The post below first appeared in Geography Directions Geographers’ interest in high streets has ebbed and flowed over the years. The 1980s saw a flurry of interest as traditional town centres were reshaped by out-of-town or edge-of-town shopping centres designed to be accessed by car. More recent scholarship has continued to frame high streets and town centres as shopping […]
Category: town centres
Community-based businesses and organisations can play a vital part in repurposing ailing high streets. But it is not a quick fix, and it demands a rethink of what creates value in town and city centres. A new report by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research finds that high streets present new opportunities for community […]
The changes in the retail character of our town and city centres may be as sweeping and significant in their way as the effects of de-industrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s, and similarly irreversible. If proof were needed that the shopping-centred high street of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is disappearing, the £517m pre-tax loss posted by […]
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In praise of planners
On Monday I gave evidence to MPs on the future of high streets and town centres. To my left was a portrait of a rather wild-looking Margaret Thatcher. It was somehow appropriate that her ghost should grimace over the discussions. What the grocer’s daughter would make of a world where groceries are shipped from vast […]
Julian Dobson 