The Covid-19 pandemic has ushered in the high street revolution at a quicker rate than anticipated as empty shops continue to crop up in town centres.
New research from the High Streets Task Force found that town centres that have evolved beyond focusing on retail as a star attraction have led to people rediscovering their local neighbourhoods in the wake of lockdown.
The high street may have been battered by the pandemic, with shops closed for months and big name retailers and restaurants disappearing for good, but town centres have fared better than bigger cities. Between March and June this year, footfall in smaller district centres plummeted by a third, albeit much less than the 75 per cent drop reported in large cities over the same period.
The task force, commissioned by the Government last year to support the transformation of high streets across England, analysed footfall from 154 towns and found that 44 per cent now provided a wider range of different “multifunctional” services beyond shopping trips. Increasingly, town planners are taking this approach with eight per cent more towns being classed in that category.
But while Covid-19 has transformed the landscape, footfall was already down five per cent since 2015 and experts are warning that a recovery to pre-Covid-19 football levels is not on the cards.
The task force is urging that the opportunity to make “productive use of redundant retail space” be grasped.