Wrap artists join vinyl revival to turn tables on empty shops before summer

A CYNIC might call it an exercise in papering over the cracks, but the vinyl wraps that are starting to cover empty shop fronts in Scarborough are more than mere window dressing.

About 10 artists are producing designs for the wrappers as part of a programme to make the town centre more attractive to the thousands of visitors expected to arrive this spring and summer.

“They will show stylised scenes of Scarborough, rather like the British Rail posters from the 1930s,” said Steve Siddons, the leader of Scarborough Borough Council.

“It will be a lot more attractive than grubby For Sale signs.”

The council has used an early tranche of the £20m it will get from the Government’s Towns Fund to pay for the artwork, along with “pop-up parks” that will see green spaces created on otherwise urban landscapes.

While the temporary art will help to disguise the absence of familiar high street names, the withdrawal of their landlords may set in train a more permanent move towards locally-run businesses.

“Like other places, we’ve lost some big names on the high street and it’s created gaps in the townscape,” Coun Siddons said.

“Debenhams and Arcadia have gone, and the Brunswick Centre has lost quite a few of its shops.

“But at the same time there are a lot of inventive local businesses in this area, and the problem has often been that they haven’t been able to afford the rent that some of the absent landlords were asking for. So hopefully this will make people think differently. It’s an opportunity for reinvention.”

In Halifax, where the restored Piece Hall is at the centre of the retail landscape, small traders are already its bread and butter.

Nicky Chance-Thompson, the chief executive of the Piece Hall Trust, said the past year had been “a tremendous challenge”.

“With consistent closures, restrictions and the cancellation of events and high footfall tourism, the pandemic has been felt in many ways by so many,” she said.

But she believed the Piece Hall, which has injected £26m into the local economy since reopening in 2017, would “once again reignite economic renewal”.