Introduction

Summary

Britain’s town and city centres are in a state of crisis. All over the country, urban centres face a set of challenges caused principally by a marked decline in the business of shopping in the town centre. The evidence of this decline is there for all to see in store closures, vacant shops, mass retail redundancies and underused high streets. Recent years have been a litany of crisis and collapse in high street retailing. In 2018, more than 14,500 stores closed with the loss of more than 117,000 jobs. In 2020, more than 16,000 stores closed and over 182,000 jobs were lost. Some of the medium-term causes of these severe contractions have been building steadily for some time. The proportion of shopping done online, for example, has increased rapidly since the early 2000s, and now makes up around a quarter of all sales. Footfall in town centres has sagged year on year across the same period. Crucially, real wages and household disposable incomes in Britain have stagnated since the 2008 financial crisis – for a sector that relies upon hoovering up consumers’ spending money, this is critical.