Death of the Salesmen

How the old high street died, why you’re to blame, and what we can all do about it.

I needed some good news. So I took the train to Kidderminster.

From the station, I walked to the high street and found the source of my cheer: Geek Retreat. Serving comic books and board games to willing buyers, Geek Retreat is the kind of place where the kids from Stranger Things would hang out, if Netflix took the bold decision to relocate the show to the West Midlands. It is a welcoming oasis for fans of sci-fi and fantasy.

I’ve never been cool enough to be a geek, so it’s not the merch that brings me here. It’s the backstory.

In its heyday, Kidderminster was the carpet capital of the world and the industry was the beating heart of the town. The 15,000 people who were employed in the factories sustained a bustling town centre that contained a mixture of big name brands and independent retailers as well as pubs and places to eat.

That heyday didn’t last; it never does. From the 1970s, the industry shrank in the face of global competition and technological advances. In a development as sad as it was symbolic, Carpets of Kidderminster went into administration in 2010.

As the factories closed, the town centre started to empty out. A study conducted just before lockdown found that nearly half (46%) of all shops on the main high street were empty, with some larger units staying unused for more than a decade.

Until a few years ago, Stefan Austin, the owner of Geek Retreat Kidderminster was part of the old economy, selling carpets from a traditional store on the high street. He watched as his colleagues in the industry shrank down, moved online only, or shut up shop completely.

Stefan did something different. At the start of 2020, he opened Geek Retreat, looking to tap into the niche but loyal and growing fanbase around fantasy, manga, and the superhero franchises. There was a queue outside on opening day, the business thrived even during Covid, and he hasn’t looked back since.

I like Stefan’s story for two reasons. First, it has a happy ending. Second, it is rare to find an individual’s story that so neatly encapsulates a major, national challenge. That challenge is the need to shift from the old high street economy, where stuff is sold in physical spaces, to an entirely new model.

The scale of the problem shouldn’t be under-estimated. Four million people work on British high streets. Ten million live on or around them. They are, or should be, a locus of civic pride. Yet the economic model that underpins the high street is dead, and policy responses to date have not engaged fully and rigorously with the severity of the problem.

In this essay, I will set out:

• How the old high street died.
• Why we’re in denial about the problem.
• What we can do to transform high streets for the future.

A second and final part, to be published later in the year, will set out a range of practical measures for making change happen through local devolution, regulatory reform, and re-financing.

As ever, the essay draws on my experience in urban regeneration and economic development, and cites exciting ideas and examples of transformation from across the UK and beyond.

How the old high street died

The traditional high street model, of mass-market goods and services being sold in large stores in urban centres, is almost completely redundant. It survives only in a few marquee locations in the biggest cities with strong visitor economies. The examples given by KPMG of the few “thriving” high streets are Regent Street in London and Buchanan Street in Glasgow.

In the vast majority of places, high streets are in terminal decline. In some places, that downward slope has been fairly gentle, and the high street retains a certain faded gentility. In other places, the decline has been hard and harsh. Whichever trajectory your high street has been on, the overall direction has been the same for a long time.

The golden age of the traditional high street ran from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. During that stretch, they played an important economic, cultural, and civic function in their towns and cities. For companies, being a high street brand brought cachet as well as cash. For the customer, going shopping became a leisure activity and symbol of social status as much as a practical necessity.

The halcyon days was brought to an end by three overlapping trends: developments in consumer tastes and habits; changes in urban planning; and advances in technology.

From the 1960s, high streets faced competition from new-build precincts like the Bull Ring in Birmingham and St. John’s in Liverpool. Then, from the 1970s, there was a trend toward American-style, out-of-town malls like Shopping City in Halton and Meadow Hall in Sheffield.

In almost all cases, these purpose-built shopping complexes cannibalised the local retail market. To make matters worse, when many of those new buildings fell out of favour, often very quickly, they contributed to the overall decline of the wider area.

Online shopping dealt the killer blow. Big-name brands like BHS, Debenhams, Woolworths, and Mothercare disappeared from the high street. The names that survived engineered a ‘retreat to profit’ by shrinking their physical footprint. The biggest were able to “re-appraise the optimal size of their UK estate from around 250 to 60 stores and a great website”.

The disappearance of familiar retail brands garnered most attention, but e-commerce had an equally huge impact on the service sector. Many bank branches now stand empty. Post Offices are closing or being miniaturised and merged into corner shops and other outlets.

No part of the old high street economy has been left untouched. In 2020, Reading’s ‘Private Shop’ closed down. Two years later, ‘Adults Only’ became the third such venue in Darlington to shut its doors. The good people of the town will have to go solo with their one remaining 18+ outlet.

Downward spiral

Many high streets reached a point of no return around the late 2000s. The underlying dynamic shifted and people began to talk about them differently. Here’s what happened.

Up to that point, empty shops and general grot and grime were the practical manifestations of a period of decline that most people hoped and expected would be temporary. The general consensus was that high streets were going through a tough time, but they were resilient and would adapt and eventually recover.

The problem has mutated since then. With a few exceptions, as highlighted above, high streets have not rebounded. Many have continued to decline. Levels of vacancy, neglected spaces, and blight are not just side-effects. They have become both cause of consequence of the problem in a downward spiral.

A few headline statistics capture the severity of the problem today:

• Year on year, total footfall on UK high streets declined for over a decade before the pandemic.
• About 40% of retail floorspace is currently surplus to requirements.
• This translates into about one in seven shops on the high street sitting empty.
• While four in every five retailers expect to make even more store closures in future.
• No areas are immune, but the problems are worse in areas with higher levels of deprivation. The North West and North East of England have more empty shops than London and the South East. Shops are also emptier for longer in poorer areas.

Despite the tonnage of data and evidence, the severity of the problem is still not fully, universally acknowledged.

And you’re to blame.

Why we’re in denial

Collectively, as citizens and consumers, we have failed to acknowledge the scale of the problem, and our complicity in creating it.

Many of us have comforting memories of the local high street from our childhood. It was the place to spend your pocket money or convert the vouchers you got at Christmas into cool stuff. To move forward, we have to accept that those days are gone forever.

Cognitively cremating those memories and associations is difficult. It is, however, necessary if we are to accept the scale of the problem and the need to radical solutions. Otherwise, as the philosopher Gramsci put it, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Our reluctance to acknowledge the terminal severity of the problem is bound up with feelings of guilt about our role in creating those morbid symptoms. According to the Office of National Statistics, 82% of people would care at least a little bit if their high street disappeared. However, few of us act on that concern.

As consumers, we could reverse the decline of the high streets with immediate effect. Instead of using our shopping app to buy some new trainers, we could use the old pair to walk to the town centre. But we don’t.

Nor did we give up our smart phones to save the phone box or cancel our streaming subscriptions to revive the video rental sector. Our refusal to accept the problem puts politicians in an awkward bind. Few candidates want to tell us that something we love is dead and gone forever. Instead they hint at a return to better times.

To give one example, the overall aim of Labour’s new five-point plan is to “get our high streets thriving again”. This is a dead-end strategy. As Pete Buttigieg argued when he was running for the Democratic nomination for US president, “you can’t have an honest politics that revolves around the word ‘again’; you’ve got to prepare people for what’s changing”. To talk about the future by signalling a return to the past is to sustain the situation that Gramsci described.

Elegy is not strategy

Just as our refusal to engage with the problem inhibits our politicians, so their resultant caution is reflected in the inquiries and studies that they commission. There have been multiple official reports into high streets over the past decade and a half.

‘Queen of Shops’ Mary Portas produced her review in late 2011. Twelve ‘Portas pilots’ followed in its wake, as did a lot of criticism. The head of DIY chain Wilkes, Bill Grimsey, described the exercise as “little more than a PR stunt” and her conclusions as “nostalgic” and “simply foolish”.

Grimsey produced his own independent report in 2013, followed by a sequel in 2018. He was refreshingly clear about the need for transformative change. Although he pointed at the media for our refusal to face up to reality when, as I argued earlier, we should acknowledge our collective connivance.

2018 also saw the publication of the conclusions of the High Streets Expert Panel, known as the Timpson report. This was produced alongside ‘High Street 2030: Achieving Change’.

Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the second lockdown, the ‘Build Back Better High Streets Strategy’ was published. This document does use the language of transformation and re-purposing, shaped no doubt the Covid-induced feeling that many norms had been shattered.

However, talk to people working on the future of high streets and there is little sense of that radical thinking being followed up with action across government. There are bold and radical plans out there, but they are the result of local innovation.

The situation is equivalent to the aftermath of a natural disaster. In the wake of an earthquake, the authorities move through a series of response stages, from immediate search and rescue, through medium-term resettlement, to longer-term reconstruction.

Thanks to the emotional, intellectual, and political confusion described above, we haven’t acknowledged the scale of the problem and developed a coherent response. You can read some political statements and get the impression that there hasn’t even been an earthquake at all; that a lick of paint and some nice signs will bring back the good old days.

We don’t need to declare a state of emergency. That usually allows central government to overstep and take on more powers when, as I’ll argue in part two, we actually need government to take a step back.

We have to take personal responsibility. As citizens and consumers we need to acknowledge that the old high streets are gone forever.

Elegy is not strategy. There is no going back. We can only move forward.

Moving forward — six ways to transform the high street

To conclude part one, I will set out six ways to transform our high streets, drawing on my experience of developing high street studies, strategies, and business plans. The six ways are:

• The giant step.
• Narrowing down.
• The night shift.
• Public service specialisation.
• Making a mall.
• Returning to nature.

These options are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Nor is it an exhaustive list in terms of the full range of possibilities. Each way forward offers a different destination but they share the same starting point described; the death of the old demands a transformative approach.

One — the giant step. The first potential way forward is the one modelled by Stefan in Kidderminster; taking one giant step from the old economy into the new. Vaulting from the traditional model of retail to the new experiential economy in which places like Geek Retreat offer precious memories instead of precious things.

The case for this move is strong. As buying things online becomes the default, the experiential economy can move into spaces vacated as a result. That same trend toward digital-by-default is also driving people to look for human interaction and socialising away from their screen. The high street of the future can be the antidote to isolation and atomisation.

A practical advantages of this transition is that it doesn’t typically require huge and costly refurbishment, compared to the other options we will examine. In fact, some potential uses work really well in old shopping spaces with minimum alterations. As an estate agent with a passion for finding new uses for old shops once put it to me: “artists love unusual spaces to work with, so old retail units are ideal.”

The difficulty with taking this kind of giant step is that, like John Coltrane’s sax solo, getting it right is “ultra-demanding”, and there is a considerable risk of failure. It requires the individuals involved to leave behind everything that is familiar for much stranger things. The risk is even greater for small businesses with little room for error and minimal contingency, which is why stories like Stefan’s are rare. When we look at making change happen in part two, I’ll set out ways in which we can support more companies to make the jump.

Two — narrow down. The second way forward is to narrow down the high street offer to a distinctive and profitable niche selling point.

Individual high street businesses are already doing this. I was developing a strategy for a Town Team when I met a shop owner who had perfected this approach. His shoe store had traded profitably from the same premises for more than three decades. He specialised in outdoor footwear, taking advantage of the store’s location near to a very popular park. While many competitors had come and gone, he had grown a loyal audience that was literally and figuratively well-heeled.

We need to apply the same thinking to high streets as a whole, by identifying and developing a distinctive selling point around which to build the offer to the rest of the world. There are many examples out there, and the key is to build on existing assets and associations.

Harlow is sharpening its ‘Sculpture Town’ brand, as the home to pieces by Rodin, Moore and Koenig. People travel for miles to sample Padstow’s seafood. West Kilbride is Scotland’s first accredited craft town. Wigtown is the country’s ‘book town’ with an annual festival and a quarter of a million books to browse and buy.

Another way for a high street to specialise is to think about a particular group in society. For example, as society ages, more and more people are living with dementia and / or caring for someone with the condition. According to recent research, a third of people with dementia have experienced loneliness and a quarter of carers felt “cut off from society”. A high street could become a leading dementia-friendly community, finding ways to give this under-served group new ways to socialise and live a full life.

Many councils, town teams, and Business Improvement Districts have long puzzled over how to engage young people. It would be fascinating to give an elected young mayor a meaningful budget and some support to re-design part of a high street and develop a programme of activities and services aimed at young people.

Narrowing down to a core offer means prioritising certain things and de-prioritising others. The latter tasks can be very difficult. It requires a mixture of effective leadership and mature partnership dialogue. Again, we’ll get into this in more detail in part two.

Three — the night shift. Another way to narrow down is to focus on the night-time economy. This is a hugely under-appreciated sector.

I worked with a client who had started to calculate the size of their town’s night-time economy. They assumed it would consist of pubs, clubs, and late-night casinos. They realised very quickly that much more went on between 6pm and 6am: deliveries and logistics; security; cleaning; night shifts in factories, hospitals, and care homes; all-night eateries to feed that nocturnal workforce.

Nationally, according to the Office of National Statistics, just over a quarter of all workers regularly worked nights in 2022. While in London, the Mayor’s office has funded a pilot programme of Night Time Enterprise Zones. One of the messages from the evaluation of the pilots is the potential to grow evening activity beyond the narrow idea of young people going to bars and clubs.

That said, night-time hospitality is still a major market. A night street offer could include 24-hour licensing and permits for events that are larger and louder than is usually allowed in a typically mixed-use town centre. As and when cannabis is legalised, or at least decriminalised, these places would be very well-positioned.

And of course there are night street options that don’t involve partying or alcohol. With light pollution on the increase, one town could become the go-to place for star-gazers, just as some rural places have tapped into the bird-watching market. Some yoga practitioners are fanatical about practising at night. How about high streets with studios where you can perfect your warrior one in the light of a waning gibbous?

Clearly, such ventures would need careful management and security to ensure people’s safety. But a small number of places that specialise in safe and well-run night-time socialising would be preferable to the current situation of under-policed town centres having a ‘wild west’ feel after dark.

Four — making a mall. To make a mall, a single owner would buy up all the properties on a street and appoint a managing agent to run the area like a private shopping centre.

This is the concept of high street ‘curation’ taken to the next level, in order to address the lack of ownership that is obvious in many high streets. At the moment, local authorities have statutory duties with regard to safety and consumer standards, and have overall planning powers, but in terms of what is bought and sold, they generally have to leave it to the market.

The single owner idea was set out in a Retail Think Tank ‘white paper’. The starting point is that the “patchwork of unit shops owned and managed by individual landlords” is a major barrier to improvement. It means there is no coherent strategic or long-term thinking. In fact, the opposite is the case, as owners try to squeeze rents out of their remaining assets.

Their solution is to “manage [high streets] commercially as shopping vehicles”. This would require the owner to have powers beyond what is sold in the shops. As one of the contributors to the white paper put it: “first it needs local authorities to be taken out of the loop, vesting use controls and parking in asset managers instead”.

This approach would raise questions about accountability and the implications of private bodies controlling public spaces. The journalist Anna Minton has written extensively on this topic. To reflect these concerns, we could adopt an approach similar to the government’s ‘freeport’ programme; treating a small number of sites as experimental sandboxes where novel approaches can be adopted and evaluated.

Five — public service specialisation. In contrast the hyper-commercial approach of making a mall, options five and six are the least profit driven. The business case for these approaches would therefore be very different.

The fifth way forward is to fundamentally repurpose the high street toward public service delivery. This would tackle two issues at once. On the one hand, we have a surplus of empty and unused buildings in and around urban centres. On the other, we have public services that are struggling to engage households with the most complicated needs; from isolated and economically inactive young men, through families living chaotic lives, to older people struggling with loneliness and the cost of living.

With relatively minor adaptations, there is a huge range of social uses for empty shops: breakfast clubs; food banks; homework clubs; training venues; social venues; winter warmth banks; advice centres; community cafes; and Little Village-style baby banks, to name just a few.

This is already happening on an ad hoc basis. Shopping City, mentioned earlier, was the biggest shopping mall in Europe when it opened. Since then, many large chains and smaller shops have left, to the extent that it was described in the national press as “the shopping centre with no shops”.

At the start of the 2023, the council and local NHS Trust opened the ‘Halton Health Hub’. They converted empty shopping units into diagnostic and consultation spaces for non-urgent issues like eyesight and hearing conditions. The hub is not far from a council one-stop shop, employment services, and a Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Over the road from Shopping City is the Community Shop that sells surplus food from retailers in Shopping City at a discounted rate.

Some places could systematise this approach by creating service centres, supported and staffed by a range of public and community sector partners. The ‘One You’ shop in the Park Mall shopping centre in Ashford, Kent offers this type of service. With financial support and contributions in kind from different public bodies, the shop offers information, advice and lifestyle services like help to stop smoking. A third of all visitors come from the most deprived parts of Ashford, demonstrating the demand for such services amongst those who would benefit most from accessing them.

These changes don’t have to be permanent. Imperial University have written a ‘Pop Up Science’ guide for “transforming empty shops into creative spaces for science engagement”. The Arts Council has funded many projects to turn empty units into galleries, classrooms, and exhibition spaces.

Nor do these changes have to be delivered by large public sector agencies. In December 2020, the Selby Big Local project took the first step toward converting a former co-op supermarket into the “Our Space” community venue.

On a much larger scale, the BBC recently ran a story about a shopping mall in Vermont, America that was used temporarily as a high school. This will mean nothing to American readers, but the school was Burlington High School, known as ‘BHS’.

As well as the usual arguments over institutional boundaries and risk management, the challenge here will be funding. In part two, we’ll look at how we can use the lessons from previous initiatives like Total Place to fund multi-agency work.

It’s also worth pointing out that this approach best fits urban areas with identified cores, and would be less applicable to rural areas with a dispersed population. No single solution will work everywhere. We need to equip local partners with the tools, resources, and skills to adopt and apply the solutions that do work for them.

Six — the return to nature. Soho, one of the busiest parts of central London, derives its name from ancient hunting slang. You may be familiar with the term “tally-ho”. That is what the hunters would shout on spotting their quarry. “So-ho” meant that the hunting dogs had been set loose to track it down. As difficult as it is to imagine today, Soho once was a forest.

The sixth option is to give our high streets back to nature. This would mean replacing buildings with greenspaces and water features. This could bring a range of benefits. Maintaining greenspace is much easier and cheaper than the upkeep of vacant and derelict buildings. Pockets of green spaces could provide oases of calm and quiet amid busy urban centres and be used to grow fruit and veg. They would also make a contribution toward local and national carbon neutrality goals.

The Newquay Orchard project is a “multifunctional orchard and community centre” that delivers health and wellbeing services to residents and produces affordable and organic fruit and veg. Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust has put forward an ambitious plan to replace to the “imposing grey jungle” of the Broadmarsh shopping centre with wetlands and wildlife habitats. As well as the environmental benefits, they argue that such an approach would boost tourism by reconnecting the city to Sherwood Forest and “invoking the spirit of Robin Hood”.

There is also potential to reconnect town and cities to their historic waterways. The “daylighting” movement seeks to uncover and re-integrate the rivers and streams that flow beneath our roads. Partners in Sheffield did exactly that. They created the Porter Brook pocket park, a space where wild trout swim and local residents can rest on amphitheatre seating. Previously, the space was a “crumbling car park with the river…nowhere to be seen”.

Across the Pennines, “huge crowds” gathered in Rochdale to watch the daylighting of the River Roch, the first step in a broader town centre regeneration programme. As well as adding a new waterfront to the town, the river will contribute to flood management; an important factor as we all manage the implications of climate change.

It can be easy to get downhearted about the future of our high streets, but look behind the immediate signs of decline and there are exciting ideas out there. In large cities and small towns, people are working on transformative approaches.

“Je maakt me gek”

The word “geek” has ancient Proto-Germanic origins, sharing the same root as the modern Dutch word “gek”, which can mean ‘crazy’ or ‘playful’. It is older even than the long-dead men and women who turned Kidderminster into the carpet capital of the world.

If they were alive today, they wouldn’t know where to begin with the purple café at the centre of their town. They might wonder why the young people inside are hunched over board games instead of sweating over spinning jennies.

They would, however, recognise the need for imaginative thinking and decisive action in response to a problem as profound as the death of the old high street. They would feel, as we should, the obligation to pass on the place we call home in a better state to future generations. They sat and passed that test. We are still scribbling, under the ticking clock and the close invigilation of history’s judgement.

The numbers I mentioned in the introduction still carry a heavy weight. Four million people work on the high streets; ten million live in and around them. But the transformation of the high street is more than a cost-benefit calculation. It is about pride and a sense of national purpose.

Whoever wins the next election will inherit barebones Britain; everywhere feels underfunded, everyone feels underpaid and underappreciated, everything feels on the brink of collapse. We need a renewed sense of pride and purpose.

There is no better place to start that process of transformation than on the high street. To complete the task, we will need to channel our inner gek and apply a good measure of crazy and playful thinking.

Get in touch

Thanks for reading. I’m a freelance consultant and writer in the fields of urban and economic development. I help councils, developers, and housing associations to attract funding, develop and deliver strategies, and evaluate their work. I’ve worked in all parts of the country and I’m always interested in talking about what I can bring to a place. Get in touch with me to arrange a chat.