The high street does not need saving. It needs fewer shops and more people living on it

Walk down the high street of almost any mid-sized English town on a Tuesday afternoon and count the empty units. In the one where I grew up, in the East Riding, I made it to 19 before the market cross. Each of those shopfronts has, at some point in the past decade, been the subject of a council strategy, a regeneration grant or a pop-up initiative to bring the shoppers back. None of it has worked, because the shoppers are not coming back. They are at home, where the shop is a screen, and no amount of bunting will change that.

What might change it is a different question: not how to fill the shops, but why we insist they should be shops at all. The British high street in its familiar form, a ribbon of ground-floor retail with a dead floor or two above, is a product of about 150 years of economic history that has now ended. We built these streets for a world in which the only way to buy a kettle was to walk to a shop that sold kettles. That world is gone. Clinging to the floor plan it produced is not conservation. It is sentimentality with a planning department.

The alternative is staring us in the face, and it is where people already lived before the Victorians rebuilt everything. Convert the empty units to homes. Let the upper floors, most of which have been storage or nothing for 50 years, be flats. Allow the ground floor to be a surgery, a nursery, a workshop, a cafe that opens at seven because the people above it need coffee. A high street with 500 residents will support a baker, a chemist and a pub without a single grant. One with none will support nothing, however many artisan markets you hold on it.

The obstacles are real but mostly self-inflicted. Planning rules in many towns still protect “retail frontage” as though it were a listed building. Business rates reliefs reward landlords for keeping a unit empty rather than converting it. Conversion costs more than new build on a greenfield site, so housing targets are met instead with estates of identical boxes on the ring road, where nobody walks anywhere and the shops are a retail park.

None of this is radical. It is how every French and Italian town centre functions, and most of them look rather well on it. It is how our own town centres worked for 500 years before the department store. The high street is not dying. It is trying to become something else, and we are standing in its way with a clipboard. Move the clipboard. Let people live there.

Fiona Kerr is a Daily Meridian columnist