How can we revitalise the high street?

What can you get for £1 nowadays? Back in 2019 it could have been an entire shopping centre. That was the reserve price on The Postings in my home town of Kirkcaldy when it was put up for auction in 2019. Where we once went on a school trip to see behind the scenes at Tesco; where a Big Issue vendor used to help push people’s trolleys to their cars on the roof car park.

Today The Postings is demolished, awaiting flats being built, leaving a big hole in the centre of town.

But it’s not the only gap. At the heart of the high street, like many others across the country, was British Home Stores. Where my mum’s first job was working on the sweetie counter; where years of school uniforms were purchased for me. Nearby there was a Littlewoods that briefly became a Debenhams. John Menzies became WH Smith but closed before TJ Jones could shut it themselves (by which point it had been turned into a cannabis farm, with a value estimated at £6 million when it was raided by police in 2022). The last good bit of business the large M&S did was when it was repurposed as a Covid vaccination centre during the pandemic.

On the cover of the local Fife Free Press last week, news that £1.5m of funding had been secured, not to rescue and restore the old cinema – where I spent most of the 1990s – but to demolish the shell that’s been left to crumble since it closed in 2000. Where flats will get built. The fate of our high streets isn’t just about economic decline, it’s personal. When you lose a bit of the town that shaped your upbringing you lose a bit of yourself. Or for those that don’t remember the feel of scratchy BHS socks and their stiff shirts, a bit of yourself that might have been.

Kirkcaldy was namechecked by then-chancellor Rachel Reeves during the autumn budget when she talked about the Growth Mission Fund to revitalise town centres. But even being awarded the maximum £20m funding isn’t enough to turn back the clock. It’d hardly buy you three cannabis farms.

Read more:

• How Britain’s high street decline is fuelling Reform UK’s rise: ‘There’s a sense that politics has failed’
• Why doesn’t Britain have a high street voucher scheme like Northern Ireland?
• Death of the high street: Why can’t Dover afford a Big Issue seller?

The story of Kirkcaldy’s town centre is the story of countless places across the UK, but there is a unique feature. Off the high street runs a close named after a famous son who was born on the site: Adam Smith, father of modern economics. I’ll let you work through The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations in your own time, but even though Smith lived 300 years ago, he can still comment on contemporary trends:

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer,” he wrote in 1776.

But is the customer always right? Through the convenience of online shopping we’ve become disconnected from the places and people we live beside. There’s plenty of space to build homes but little chance of those homes building a community.

Online shopping joins rising business rates and parking charges among other factors to blame. If you’re going to drive, better off at the out-of-town retail park, so busy sometimes it can be tricky to find a space. That’s where M&S moved to. That’s where the town’s Big Issue vendor can now be found. Adapting with the times as all sellers need to.

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