The Death of the High Street: We Were Once a Nation of Shopkeepers. Perhaps We Need to Become a Nation of Makers Again…

Walk through almost any northern town centre and the signs of change are difficult to ignore.

The names vary, but the pattern is familiar: empty units, shuttered department stores, discount retail, betting shops, takeaways and the remnants of national chains that once made one British High Street look remarkably like another.

For decades, we were told that attracting the big brands was a sign of success. A town had arrived when the familiar national and international names appeared.

Starbucks. Costa. H&M. Next. Burger King. Primark.

But something was lost along the way.

Our High Streets gradually stopped telling us very much about the towns in which they stood.

The Rise of the Clone Town

Nearly twenty years ago, the New Economics Foundation gave this phenomenon a wonderfully simple name: Clone Town Britain.

Its research described traditional High Streets, once populated by independent butchers, bakers, bookshops, pubs, greengrocers and family businesses, becoming increasingly dominated by supermarkets, fast-food chains, national retailers and global fashion brands.

The problem wasn't simply aesthetic.

A High Street dominated by businesses controlled elsewhere has a fundamentally different relationship with its town.

A national retailer does not exist because it is part of Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford, Leeds or Manchester. The town is a distribution point within a much larger commercial network.

If that location no longer achieves the return required by head office, it can close.

And increasingly, they have.

The result is what we rather dramatically call "the death of the High Street."

But perhaps the High Street isn't dying.

Perhaps a particular version of the High Street is dying.

And that distinction matters.

Look Across the Channel

Spend time in France and there appears, at least superficially, to be a striking contrast.

In many towns you can still encounter the boulanger, independent café, wine merchant, artisan, market, restaurant and small boutique. Collectively, these businesses contribute to a sense of place.

But we should be careful about romanticising France.

French town centres are struggling too. Commercial vacancy in shopping streets reached 14% in 2024, compared with 6% in 2010.

Rural France has an even greater problem. More than 21,000 French communes have no shop at all — 62% of communes, compared with 25% in 1981.

So France has certainly not discovered a magical defence against Amazon, online shopping, changing lifestyles or the economics of modern retail.

What is interesting is how the French increasingly talk about the problem.

They use the concept of commerce de proximité — local or proximity commerce — and explicitly connect local shops with employment, social cohesion and the attractiveness of a place.

That changes the question.

Rather than simply asking:

"How do we fill this empty shop?"

we can ask:

"What economic activity would make people want to live, work, shop and spend time here?"

That is a very different starting point.

The High Street Has to Give Us Something the Internet Cannot

There is little point trying to beat online retail at its own game.

The internet offers extraordinary choice, price comparison, home delivery and convenience. The traditional shop that simply takes a product manufactured elsewhere, puts it on a shelf and waits for somebody to buy it is increasingly competing with an incredibly efficient digital distribution system.

But there are things the internet cannot deliver.

Place. Experience. Human interaction. Discovery. Community. Provenance.

These could become the competitive advantages of the new High Street.

Recent UK research supports part of this argument. Centre for Cities found significant differences between successful and struggling centres and identified an oversupply of conventional retail space in some weaker locations. Successful centres have also shifted some redundant retail towards food, cafés and restaurants.

In other words, the answer isn't necessarily more shops.

It is giving people more reasons to come.

And that presents Northern England with an extraordinary opportunity.

What If We Started Making Things Again?

The North possesses something that many regions would give a great deal to recreate.

We have extraordinary textile heritage.

Yorkshire wool. Lancashire cotton. Leeds tailoring. Huddersfield cloth. Manchester manufacturing.

Alongside that heritage sits a contemporary creative economy of fashion designers, pattern cutters, machinists, photographers, videographers, stylists, models, jewellers, textile designers and independent brands.

Much of it is fragmented and largely invisible to consumers.

Imagine bringing those things together.

Instead of asking which multinational retailer can be persuaded to occupy another empty shop, ask:

What can this town make that nowhere else can?

That question sits at the heart of the Love the North ethos.

Not nostalgia.

Not recreating some imaginary 1950s High Street.

And certainly not pretending that every product we consume should suddenly be manufactured within five miles of where we live.

It is about provenance, identity and value.

Turn Empty Shops Into Incubators

Independents in a redundant Retail store

France is currently experimenting with something particularly interesting.

Its Made in Local programme is making persistently vacant commercial premises available to local traders and artisans so they can test their commercial potential.

Think about what a northern fashion version of that could achieve.

One of the greatest barriers facing an emerging designer is the enormous jump between selling through Instagram, markets or a website and operating a permanent shop.

Rent. Business rates. Utilities. Staff. Insurance. Shopfitting. Stock.

The risk becomes prohibitive.

So why not share it?

Take a vacant former chain store and turn it into a Northern fashion marketplace.

Twenty designers rather than one.

Shared staff. Shared changing rooms. Shared payment infrastructure. Shared marketing. Shared events.

But importantly, not twenty anonymous products underneath another corporate retail brand.

Twenty individual northern brands, each retaining its own identity.

A customer might enter because they know one designer and leave having discovered five more.

The empty shop becomes an incubator.

Don't Hide the Making

We could take the concept much further.

For generations, the North manufactured some of the world's finest textiles and clothing. Yet modern retail has separated the consumer almost completely from the process of making.

We should reverse that.

Put designers in studios.

Let people see garments being made.

Let them meet the person who designed the coat they are trying on.

Put alteration services alongside retail.

Show cloth being cut.

Tell people where the wool came from.

Explain where it was woven.

Put photography and content studios upstairs.

Then add food, coffee, events and hospitality.

Suddenly we aren't building another clothes shop.

We are creating a destination.

That is precisely where fashion becomes particularly powerful as a regeneration tool.

From Retail Economy to Creative Economy

Consider two £150 garments.

One has been designed thousands of miles away, manufactured elsewhere, shipped into Britain and sold through a national retail chain.

Much of the creative and manufacturing value has already been created before the garment reaches the North.

Now consider another.

The cloth is woven in Yorkshire.

A northern designer creates the garment.

A local pattern cutter develops it.

A local manufacturer makes it.

A northern photographer creates the campaign.

Local models appear in it.

A regional marketing business promotes it.

An independent northern retailer sells it.

The customer then has lunch next door.

The £150 purchase has become part of a much larger regional economic ecosystem.

That doesn't mean rejecting international trade.

It means recognising that the more stages of the value chain we can competitively retain here, the greater the opportunity for northern businesses, skills and employment.

Every Town Shouldn't Look the Same

There is an important warning here.

If we successfully rebuilt northern High Streets only to fill every one with an identical collection of "Northern" shops, we would simply create Clone Town Britain 2.0.

The opportunity is precisely the opposite.

Different places should develop different identities.

Huddersfield can build upon textiles, wool and manufacturing.

Manchester can celebrate contemporary fashion, music and street culture.

Leeds can develop designer fashion, tailoring and luxury.

Liverpool can connect fashion with occasionwear, glamour, music and its enormous cultural identity.

Newcastle can develop its own distinctive independent fashion and creative scene.

York can combine fashion, heritage, luxury and tourism.

The objective isn't to prescribe those identities from above. It is to uncover, connect and amplify what is genuinely there.

Then give people a reason to travel between them.

Shopping Becomes Part of a Day Out

This is another lesson worth taking from France.

Retail works when it exists within a broader ecosystem.

You shop.

You eat.

You drink coffee.

You wander.

You meet people.

You discover something unexpected.

You stay for dinner.

The economic measurement that matters isn't simply how many transactions one shop processes. It is also dwell time and the wider expenditure generated by the visit.

That is why restaurants, cafés, markets, events, creative businesses and cultural activities shouldn't be regarded as things competing with retail space.

They help create demand for it.

The future northern fashion destination might therefore combine a designer marketplace, visible manufacturing, exhibitions, fashion shows, photography studios, education, restaurants and events within the same district — perhaps even within the same building.

Fashion stops being merely something sold there.

It becomes part of the entertainment.

From Vacant Property to Productive Infrastructure

Britain now has something independent businesses struggled to access during the great expansion of chain retail:

Space.

Centre for Cities' analysis found particularly high vacancy rates in several northern centres, including Bradford, Blackpool, Sunderland, Birkenhead and Wigan. It argues that struggling places frequently have too much conventional retail space for the demand available.

That sounds depressing.

It needn't be.

Former department stores and large retail units offer exactly the sort of space in which we could combine small-scale manufacturing, studios, shared retail, events, education, hospitality and creative businesses.

The infrastructure left behind by the old High Street could become the infrastructure for the next one.

Love the North

This is ultimately what Love the North should represent.

Not simply a geographical label.

It should represent confidence in northern creativity, craftsmanship, provenance and identity.

We have spent decades watching enormous quantities of consumer expenditure flow through our towns while surprisingly little of the value behind the products being purchased was created there.

Changing that won't happen overnight.

Nor will every independent brand survive. Entrepreneurship necessarily involves experimentation, success and failure.

But perhaps the empty shop should no longer automatically be regarded as evidence that the town has failed.

Perhaps it is affordable productive space waiting for a new generation to occupy it.

We should stop asking how we persuade yesterday's retailers to come back.

Instead, we should ask what tomorrow's High Street is actually for.

Napoleon is famously associated with describing Britain as a nation of shopkeepers.

Perhaps the North doesn't simply need to become a nation of shopkeepers again.

We need to become a nation of makers — and give them shops.