High Street: How our town centres can bounce back from the retail crisis

The high street is in crisis. How did we get here and what’s next?

A global pandemic made it immeasurably worse, but the crisis was already happening in 2019 when 140,000 jobs were lost in retail. The retail model on which our high streets are based has changed forever and our towns and cities need to adapt to this change.

Much of the current policy agenda is aimed at trying to regenerate the high street but it is doing so without properly diagnosing the problem.

The reality is that problems run deep due to changing consumer behaviour, underinvestment and financial mismanagement. Town centres are the victims of these changes rather than the cause of them.

To understand the current crisis and how it might be addressed, this book takes a long view of retailing and cities based on five previous crises. In-depth research explores the ways that town and city centres are responding to these retail trends and the crisis they have triggered.

Explore the past to understand the present and find a better future.