The high street is in crisis. How did we get here and what happens next? The global pandemic has made the crisis immeasurably worse but it wasn’t the cause. The crisis was already raging in 2019 with thousands of store closures. Large retailers became complacent and failed to respond to changing consumer behaviour. 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 based on a hundred case studies. It looks at the way town centres responded to previous crises and explores current trends affecting town centres and how places are responding. The message is optimistic: adaptable town centres can once more become the diverse, characterful, independent places that existed before they were homogenised by big retail. Explore the past – understand the present – find a better future.

This book analyses the social and cultural status of high streets in the age of recession and austerity. High streets are shown to have long been regarded as the heart of many communities, but have declined to a state where boarded-up and vacant retail units are a familiar sight in many British cities. The book argues that the policies deemed necessary to revive the fortunes of high streets are often thinly-veiled attacks on the tastes and cultures of the working class. Policy-makers often promote boutiques, art galleries and upmarket cafés at the expense of some of the outlets frequented by less affluent populations, including betting shops, fast food takeaways, discount stores and bargain booze outlets. Highlighting the social and cultural roles that so-called 'dying' high streets continue to play in the lives of working class and disadvantaged populations, this book provides a powerful argument against retail gentrification, and a timely analysis of class conflict in austerity Britain. It will be of great interest to scholars of geography, social policy and cultural studies.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.