Walk down the main shopping street of most English market towns on a Tuesday afternoon and the pattern is hard to miss: shuttered windows, faded letting boards, the occasional charity shop holding the line where a clothes retailer or a bank used to be. The latest vacancy data, compiled by the British Retail Consortium and cross-referenced with local authority records, puts the average high street vacancy rate at 14.3 per cent — up from 11.8 per cent two years ago.
The government's High Streets Task Force, established in 2020, has produced a series of reports and recommendations. Several town centres have received funding through the Levelling Up programme. The numbers, however, tell a story that the announcements don't.
The independents are leaving
It's not the large chains that are disappearing fastest — most of those left years ago. What's closing now are the independent traders: the family-run newsagent, the hardware shop that's been there since the 1970s, the café that opened during the pandemic and somehow survived it, only to be undone by a rent review.
James Whitfield spoke to seven independent retailers across three towns for this report. All seven said their single biggest concern was the cost of their lease. Six of the seven said they had approached their landlord about a rent reduction and been refused. Four said they expected to close within 18 months if trading conditions didn't improve.
What the data shows
The vacancy figures mask a more complicated picture. Some of the empty units are large former department store sites that have been vacant for years and are unlikely to be filled by traditional retail. Others are smaller units that cycle through short-term tenants — pop-up shops, market stalls, temporary exhibitions — without ever achieving the stability that defines a functioning high street.
The towns that are doing relatively well tend to share a few characteristics: a strong independent food and drink offer, proximity to residential development, and a council that has been willing to use compulsory purchase powers to break the deadlock on long-vacant sites. Those conditions are not common.
A structural problem
Economists who study retail consistently make the same point: the high street as it existed in the 1990s is not coming back. Online shopping has permanently shifted a proportion of spending that will not return to physical stores. The question is not how to restore the old model but what replaces it — and that question doesn't have an easy answer.
Some councils are experimenting with converting upper floors of retail buildings into housing, using the ground floor for community uses rather than commercial tenants. Others are investing in markets, events, and public realm improvements in the hope that footfall will follow. The results are mixed, and the timescales are long.