The high street: is it doomed?

“Basildon has been here before,” said Jonathan Eley and George Hammond in the FT. In 2005, the department store Allders went bust – leaving a large gap in the town’s Eastgate Shopping Centre. It was soon filled by a Debenhams; but last week, that chain warned that it was about to go into liquidation, potentially dealing a huge blow to town centres across the country. The failure of Debenhams, following the collapse of the Arcadia Group – which includes Topshop and Burton – a day earlier, will leave fallow some 15.5 million square feet of retail space nationwide. Twenty-five thousand jobs are at risk. Of course, the high street has been in decline for years; but since lockdown restrictions forced bricks and mortar retailers to close, and many workers to stay at home, a trickle of closures has become a “flood”. In April, all 531 branches of Carphone Warehouse closed; and in November, J. Sainsbury announced that 420 Argos stores will be gone by 2024. There are already 44,000 empty shop units on our high streets – a figure likely to double over the next few years.

Retailers can survive; they just need to get creative, said Mary Portas in the same paper. Topshop failed because it neglected to maintain the buzz that had once made it such an exciting place to go. Today, it’s not enough just to sell stuff: to compete with online giants, retailers must have a sharp understanding of their customers’ needs and serve them (like Primark), or offer a service or experience that can’t be captured online – whether it’s a high level of staff expertise or an in-store skate park. There has long been talk of luring people back to high streets by offering a “trendier and more diverse range of businesses”, said The Economist. And in more prosperous cities, shopping spaces are being converted into luxury flats, hotels and mini-golf courses. But in disadvantaged areas, the “hipsterfication” of boarded-up shopping centres seems like an “empty promise”.

Should we accept that Amazon has won, and that our high streets are finished? That’s a dangerous path to start down, said Janice Turner in The Times. When the main shopping area is hollowed out and becoming derelict, “confidence bleeds and a town quickly becomes a no-go Gotham”. The Centre for Cities says the only way to revive depressed towns is to improve the skills of their workforce so that the local economy grows. In the meantime, councils must fill the void by encouraging further education colleges, care homes, nurseries and health clinics to return to town centres. That will bring people, and good independent shops will follow. The pandemic has “killed off what was dying anyway: maybe something better will be born”.