Britain Had the Best High Streets in the World… Until This Happened

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]Saturday morning, 1968.

[00:00:04]Before you even turn the corner, you can smell it. Fresh bread from the bakery.

[00:00:09]That warm yeasty cloud that hits you before the door even opens.

[00:00:13]You are on your high street.

[00:00:15]And everyone else is, too.

[00:00:17]The butcher already has the back door propped open.

[00:00:20]He knows Mrs. Aldridge comes in at half nine and he has already put something aside for her.

[00:00:25]He does that because he knows her.

[00:00:27]Because she has been coming in every Saturday [music] for 12 years. You might have forgotten how that felt.

[00:00:32]But the second I describe it, it comes straight back, doesn't it?

[00:00:35]There is a queue outside the grocer's.

[00:00:37]Not a long one. Four women with baskets talking.

[00:00:41]The bell above the door jingles. A boy presses his face against the Woolworth's window. His mother is two shops down collecting the fish she ordered on Tuesday.

[00:00:50]It comes wrapped in paper, passed over the counter with a smile.

[00:00:54]This was not just shopping.

[00:00:55]This was the center of your town. The place where your community breathed. And somebody destroyed it. Not by accident, by choice. This is how they did it.

[00:01:05]There is a small street in Windsor, early 1960s.

[00:01:09]On that one stretch of pavement, there are seven butchers, seven greengrocers, and nine grocers. Nine. Including International Stores, Lipton's, Home & Colonial, and David Greig's.

[00:01:21]If you left your order at International Stores on Tuesday, it was delivered to your door on Thursday.

[00:01:26]Every one of those shops had a person behind the counter who knew your name.

[00:01:30]Knew your children.

[00:01:31]Knew what you liked before you asked.

[00:01:33]The elderly woman who lived alone had a reason to leave the house every morning.

[00:01:37]The teenager who wanted to earn something had somewhere to get a Saturday job.

[00:01:41]The man who needed a screw for his shelf got exactly four of them counted into a brown paper bag by someone who knew what size [music] he needed.

[00:01:49]That is what a high street was. Not a retail transaction. A reason to be somewhere.

[00:01:55]A reason to be part of something.

[00:01:57]You got dressed for it.

[00:01:59]Proper dressed.

[00:02:00]Because going to the shops meant going into public, and public life had a standard. Children learn how to behave.

[00:02:07]Mothers caught up with [music] neighbors they hadn't seen since Wednesday.

[00:02:10]Your nan could spend an hour in the department store looking at fabrics, trying on a hat, having a proper cup of tea brought to her table by a waitress in a black dress.

[00:02:19]Real cups, real sauces.

[00:02:22]For ordinary people on an ordinary Saturday. That mattered more than anyone realized. Because the moment you strip that away from a town, something in the town stops breathing.

[00:02:32]And the first crack appeared earlier than most people think.

[00:02:36]The 2nd of March, 1976.

[00:02:39]North London. Brent Cross Shopping Centre opens its doors. Britain's first American-style out-of-town indoor shopping centre. 19 years in the planning. £20 million to build. The Prince of Wales cut the ribbon. One journalist called it a futuristic concept. Another called it hideous and soulless. Both turned out to be right.

[00:03:01]Brent Cross had 75 shops under one roof.

[00:03:04]Air conditioning. Late opening. Free parking.

[00:03:08]On its first day, 120,000 people walked through those doors.

[00:03:13]But here is the thing nobody said out loud at the time.

[00:03:16]Brent Cross did not create 120,000 [music] new shoppers. Those were 120,000 journeys that would have gone to town centers. To the butcher. To the greengrocer. To the woman behind the counter who knew your name.

[00:03:30]The shopping center did not grow the economy. It moved [music] it. 20 p in the pound. That is what those 120,000 visits [music] cost your high street that day.

[00:03:40]In today's money, each one of those visits took roughly six or seven pounds out of your town center and put it somewhere with a car park and a food court.

[00:03:48]From the very first morning, the model pulled spending away. It didn't build anything new. It just hollowed out what already existed.

[00:03:56]The high street was built around walking, around being local, around being somewhere specific.

[00:04:03]The shopping center was built around the car.

[00:04:05]And once you're in a car, you can go anywhere.

[00:04:08]Somewhere was no longer enough.

[00:04:11]But the worst decisions hadn't even been made yet.

[00:04:14]Now, here is the part that almost nobody talks about because Brent Cross was just a crack. What came next was a wrecking ball, and the people swinging it were not some faceless corporation. They were the government, your government, the people elected to protect the places you grew [music] up in.

[00:04:30]What they did instead is staggering. The 29th of October, 1980, Chancellor Geoffrey Howe stands up and announces the Dudley Enterprise Zone, a patch of the Black Country scarred by the closure of the Round Oak Steelworks.

[00:04:44]The promise was regeneration, new industry, new jobs, a fresh start for a town that had already lost so much.

[00:04:53]What it actually got was a shopping center.

[00:04:56]Merry Hill was built between [music] 1985 and 1990, right there on the Enterprise Zone. And because of the zone designation, whoever built there paid no business rates for 10 years, no land taxes, relaxed planning permission, nothing.

[00:05:12]Think about that for a moment. A developer could build a massive out-of-town retail complex 2 miles from Dudley town center and pay absolutely nothing for a decade. The big retailers did [music] the maths and made their choice immediately. Why pay full rates on a high street in Dudley when you could pay nothing 2 miles down the road?

[00:05:31]They left. Not because they went bust, not because they failed. They simply walked away from your town center because the system made it financially stupid to stay.

[00:05:40]And Merry Hill was not alone. The Metro Centre opened in Gateshead on the 28th of April, 1986, built on a former industrial site, financed in part by the Church Commissioners [music] of England.

[00:05:53]The body responsible for the spiritual welfare of English communities put money into a development that helped pull those communities apart.

[00:06:00]Meadowhall in Sheffield, 1990. Built on the old Hadfield steel works. One after another, the same story.

[00:06:09]Different city, same result.

[00:06:12]The high street was being demolished with public money, and nobody called it what it was.

[00:06:17]At the center of all of this sat a single government document. Most people have never heard of it. Planning Policy Guidance Note 6, published 1988.

[00:06:28]It should have been the high street's shield. Instead, it handed developers a loaded weapon.

[00:06:33]The document stated that local authorities should not use the planning system to inhibit competition.

[00:06:39]In plain English, if a developer wanted to build a retail park on a field outside your town, your council could not say no on the grounds that it would kill your high street.

[00:06:49]That is not a loophole. That is the law.

[00:06:51]Dudley's own planning officers warned exactly what was coming.

[00:06:55]Neighboring councils tried to stop Merry Hill's expansion. They were overruled.

[00:07:00]The people who knew their town best were told their concerns did not matter.

[00:07:04]Here is the fact that still shocks me every time I read it.

[00:07:08]By the time the planning guidance was finally revised in 1996 to require developers to consider town center sites first, nearly a thousand superstores had already been approved. A thousand. And here is something most people alive today never knew.

[00:07:23]France and Germany saw exactly the same pressure from developers during the same period. They restricted out-of-town retail far more strictly, protected their town centers in law. Today, their high streets are measurably more alive than ours.

[00:07:37]Britain made a different choice. The Sunday Trading Act followed in August 1994.

[00:07:44]Large stores could now open on Sundays.

[00:07:46]For independent shopkeepers built around 6 days of trade, one small retailer reported a 30% drop in Sunday footfall within the first year alone. The big stores absorbed it. The family shop on the corner could not.

[00:08:00]If you want to understand what all of this [music] actually cost real people, look at Dudley.

[00:08:04]In 1984, Dudley town center was alive. A large Marks & Spencer, BHS across the road, Woolworths a few doors up, a three-floor Littlewoods with a popular restaurant upstairs, Battys department store around the corner, Cooks at the top of the High Street. It was a proper town with a proper center.

[00:08:24]Then Merry Hill arrived 2 miles away with free rates and 10,000 [music] parking spaces.

[00:08:29]Marks & Spencer closed their Dudley store in August 1990. Then BHS, then Sainsbury's, then Littlewoods. One by one they left. Not bankrupt, just gone.

[00:08:40]Down the road to somewhere that charged them nothing. Within 5 years, an independent study found that footfall in Dudley town center had fallen by 70%.

[00:08:50]Imagine your town losing seven in every 10 people who used to walk through it in 5 years.

[00:08:57]Alan Caswell ran the toy shop in the Fountain Arcade for half a century.

[00:09:01]Within 2 years of Merry Hill opening, he had to close one shop and let three staff go.

[00:09:06]His neighbor, Laurie F, kept Castle Sports Shop in the same arcade. As trade dried up, he fell behind on his rates.

[00:09:13]Bailiffs came. He painted a message on the windows as he left for the last time.

[00:09:18]I paid my rates for 30 years and Dudley Council shut me down.

[00:09:22]Merry Hill paid no rates for 10 years.

[00:09:25]If you were not there, nobody alive can properly explain what it felt like to watch your town center empty [music] out like that.

[00:09:31]You either lived it or you didn't.

[00:09:33]You either know or you don't.

[00:09:36]But the town centers weren't just by policy. They were stripped apart by specific people, and those people did very well out of it.

[00:09:45]Philip Green bought BHS in 2000. While the company still had money, Green extracted hundreds of millions in dividends. In 2015, he sold it for £1 to a man who had been bankrupt three times and had no retail experience whatsoever.

[00:10:00]11,000 jobs [music] gone. 20,000 people's pensions put at risk. A pension deficit of 571 million pounds. A parliamentary committee called it the unacceptable face of capitalism.

[00:10:14]When BHS collapsed, photographs appeared of Green on his yacht. Parliament asked him to contribute to the pension fund.

[00:10:21]He eventually paid 363 million.

[00:10:24]The yacht stayed where it was.

[00:10:26]Then came Amazon.

[00:10:28]Launched in Britain [music] in October 1998.

[00:10:32]By 2018, over 18 pence in every pound spent by British shoppers went online.

[00:10:38]Amazon pays minimal business rates on [music] warehouse space outside cities.

[00:10:42]A high street shop pays full rates in the center of your town. The system does not just allow this, it actively rewards Amazon for replacing [music] the places we used to gather.

[00:10:51]In 2024, over 12,800 chain stores closed across Britain.

[00:10:57]Roughly 35 a day.

[00:10:58]6,700 bank branches closed since 2015.

[00:11:03]68% of all branches that existed [music] a decade ago. Gone.

[00:11:08]This was not inevitable. This was not just the market. This was a series of choices made by people in government.

[00:11:14]Choices made by people in boardrooms, and choices made by a system that valued profit over place. This wasn't just shops closing. This was a way of life we built over centuries taken apart in a generation. And nobody asked us if that was all right. We didn't know it was ending. That is the thing that stays with you.

[00:11:32]We didn't know that the Saturday we spent on the high street as a child would one day be the last time things looked like that.

[00:11:38]We didn't know that the woman behind the counter who always remembered your mother's order would one day lock the door and not come back.

[00:11:45]We didn't know that the boy pressing his nose against the Woolworths window was pressing it against something that would be gone before he was old enough to buy anything inside.

[00:11:54]We just lived it. We just walked those streets. We just thought it would always be there.

[00:11:59]The high street asks something of you.

[00:12:01]Get dressed. Leave the house. Walk somewhere. Talk to someone. Be part of public life.

[00:12:08]The retail park asks nothing. Just a car and a card. And what we lost when the high street emptied was not just a place to buy things. We lost the reason to leave the house. We lost the accidental conversations.

[00:12:21]We lost the elderly woman who used to [music] walk to the shops every morning just to feel connected to something.

[00:12:26]We lost the place where we were a community without [music] anyone having to arrange it. Walk down many British high streets today. A betting shop. A vape shop. A pound store. A charity shop. Three empty units and a blank fascia above a door where something used to be.

[00:12:43]That blank sign is not just an empty space. It is what happens when a hundred decisions go the wrong way made by people who never [music] had to live with the results. The shop is gone. The street is quiet. The community that used to gather there without being asked is somewhere else now.

[00:13:00]Scattered.

[00:13:01]And no one in power has ever once said sorry for that. If you remember your Saturday on the high street, tell me about it in the comments. Tell me the shop. Tell me the town. Tell me the smell when you walked in.

[00:13:13]Those stories matter and I read every single one.

[00:13:16]If you grew up on a high street that has since changed beyond recognition, share this with someone who was there, too. A sibling. An old school friend. Someone who would understand without [music] you having to explain it. And if you are new here, this channel is about remembering the Britain that shaped us.

[00:13:32]The places, the things, the small details that the history books never quite capture.

[00:13:39]Subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. Right then, I'll see you in the next one.