Sold Out: The Death of the British High Street
Monotonous metropolis, Clone Town Britain, or Ghost Town Britain, call it what you like, the indisputable truth is British towns and cities are losing their identity and dying off. Independent stores that were once vital to the fabric of towns are disappearing at a rate of 50 shops a week. Research released in February 2010 showed that some towns now have as many as 24% of their shops shuttered. Boarded-up high streets are already contributing to a marked increase in crime and anti social behaviour.
It is all too easy to blame supermarket giants such as Tesco for the nation’s ills and hark back to the idealised notion of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. But no, there are there are many more culprits for the position we now find ourselves in and supermarkets, for all their faults, are just one factor. Nor can it be forgotten that they also play a vital part in modern life. Put simply, not many of us are prepared to swap our fast and convenient weekly shop for a daily trawl of the high street, wicker basket in hand.
Is there a happy medium? A solution to rebuilding and enjoying our town centres again? After many years covering the retail beat for national newspapers, I have decided to uncover what is really happening to our high streets. To get away from the spin, the counter-spin and rhetoric I have taken a journey across Britain to speak to everyone involved and get first-hand evidence of the death of our town centres. The result of these travels, Sold Out, uses hundreds of interviews with everyone involved with our retail environment from shopkeepers in large chain stores to independent shops, to ordinary shoppers, to planners, law-makers and campaigners.
The results build a fascinating picture of how we want to shop in the modern world and why. It shows what people love, and hate, about their local high streets and the true affect of empty shops on the environment, crime and jobs. It also proves that we are all a little bit to blame for selling out our retail heritage – but it is not too late to do something about it.
Book Author
Teena Lyons spent ten years as a business, financial and consumer specialist on national newspapers and magazines before leaving Fleet Street in May 2006 to take up the challenge of becoming a ghostwriter.
Her first book, On Leadership, co-written with corporate guru Allan Leighton, became a business bestseller and its success led to many subsequent projects with well-known business people. The most recent book that Teena collaborated on was Common Sense Rules by Deborah Meaden of TV’s Dragons Den.
As well as straight, ‘how I made it’ style biographies, Teena also speci...
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