My hometown shows that high streets have to change or die

The vacant building that once housed Marks & Spencer in Aberdeen is among the first sights you encounter when you step off the train and head into the city centre. The sign has been removed, though the outline of the lettering is still visible; the windows are blacked out and the doors are boarded shut.

This is my hometown. As a teenager, I spent hours on Union Street, the city’s main artery, known as the Granite Mile because of the local silver-grey stone. It was where you went to try on the latest fashions from shops such as Clockhouse and Chelsea Girl.

The street once drew shoppers from all over north-east Scotland.

Now it is dotted with empty stores.

“I come to Union Street to take a bus somewhere else... there’s nothing to shop for now… it’s horrendous,” says Marie Sim, who has lived in Aberdeen all her life.

The same pattern is playing out across the country: High Streets, once full of shops, were first hit by the growth of out-of-town retail parks and then by online shopping.

Aberdeen, though, is in the middle of an ambitious effort to turn things around. The port city has effectively declared war on its vacant-shop problem, taking an unusually direct approach to filling empty units and bringing long-neglected upper floors back into use.

The Marks & Spencer flagship store in Aberdeen closed in August, 80 years after it opened there

In addition, the council is investing tens of millions in an attempt to make the city centre a place people want to visit again. As in many other places, it is embracing the “experience economy”, with a new indoor food and drink market and a major redevelopment of the seafront.

High Streets matter to how we feel about where we live. The sight of empty shops and graffiti can quickly create a vicious circle, putting off shoppers, discouraging investment and contributing to anti-social behaviour.

Politicians of every persuasion have spent years trying to revive town centres - and Andy Burnham, who has made “place” central to his political identity, is the latest. He says they should become “symbols of Britain’s renaissance”.

But is that possible? And if town centres are to survive, do they need a complete rethink?

According to Green Street, the property and retail analytics company, one in eight properties on British High Streets is currently vacant, a figure that has remained stubbornly high for years.

“If there was a silver bullet, it would have been fired years ago,” says Jackie Sadek, a former government adviser on urban regeneration who has spent almost four decades working on town centre renewal.

One of the biggest problems is fragmented ownership. Shops and buildings are often owned by dozens of different landlords, sometimes via offshore companies or complicated structures, each with their own interests and priorities. That can slow decisions and make large-scale regeneration hard.

But even when empty units are available, someone still has to be willing to take them on.

Many units are old and need updating.

One in eight properties on British High Streets is currently vacant

Running a High Street business has also become more expensive; employment costs are higher, and business rates add another burden.

Businesses need customers. Footfall on many High Streets has been falling for years as shopping and services move online, and this huge structural change has still not fully played out.

Two-thirds of town centre experts believe there is still 20% to 40% too much retail space, according to a survey by retail body Revo and real estate consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton.

During Aberdeen’s North Sea oil boom, from the late 1970s to the early 2010s, the city did not have to work hard to fill hotels and restaurants or keep the tills ringing because of the wealth the energy industry brought.

I remember weekends as a teenager, spending whatever money we had in fashion chains and shoe shops. Later came the pubs and bar-hopping, and visits to the art deco Capitol Theatre, now office space, where I saw Duran Duran.

But by the end of 2022, Union Street had reached rock bottom. Aberdonians had long since abandoned the High Street for a shopping centre that opened in 2009 beside the railway station.

“They’d fallen out of love with their city,” says Bob Keiller, head of the Our Union Street coalition, a community-led group formed after an emergency summit to tackle the decline.

The first step was to listen to residents, and thousands of submissions were received. Restoring civic pride and filling empty units became the priorities.

It has been a coordinated effort involving letting agents, the council, landlords, businesses and a large team of volunteers, led by Keiller, a former FTSE 100 chief executive who is unpaid. In his office, he has a wall map showing the status of every property, unit by unit, with colour-coded Post-it notes.

They audited the street, tracking down absent landlords and recording what was empty and why. Volunteers offered to clean and paint the vacant properties to make them more attractive to tenants. They also tidied the streets, picking up litter, weeding and painting bins. A small team still goes out once every fortnight.

Bob Keiller heads a community-led group set up to help revive Aberdeen’s Union Street

There is a website listing all available properties; crucially, all the financial incentives are listed too. These can include council fit-out grants, which give new businesses money to decorate premises, and a two-year business rates discount.

In 2023, 57 of the 198 units on Union Street were empty. Today, 33 have been filled, with another 14 in the process of being let.

But it can feel like a game of whack-a-mole because since the initiative began, another 20 units have become vacant. “The key thing is, we’re filling quicker than emptying,” Keiller insists.

Keiller’s operations director, David McKeith, says the approach is about putting an arm round the shoulder of those they can help and being a “wasp in the ear” of people who simply say no.

At one end of the office, a small young team creates social media content, connecting visitors and residents to a new Our Aberdeen app that shows what the city has to offer.

For Keiller, the “small wins” - such as dealing with graffiti - are necessary to shift public perception.

“We’ve realised the psychology is not to do it once but be prepared to do it two or three times before people that do these things eventually say, ‘there’s no point in putting it there because somebody’s going to paint over it.’”

Attention is also turning to the often overlooked upper floors of buildings along the once-iconic Union Street. In a separate project, experts are going into those vacant upper spaces to identify the barriers to bringing them back into use.

Aberdeen asked for help from a High Street troubleshooter, Iain Nicholson, who has worked with dozens of towns and cities through his Vacant Shops Academy.

Of more than 1,000 empty units he helped audit nationally, on average more than half did not have a letting agent actively marketing the property. He says some councils do not even know who the landlords are.

He says empty shops will not all be filled by the market alone. Towns and cities need to encourage a wider mix of occupiers, from arts and culture to leisure, health and well-being.

What stands out about Aberdeen, he says, is its joined-up approach and the fact that people “rolled up their sleeves” and overcame differences. “That’s not something you can yet say about everywhere.”

Can other places learn from Aberdeen?

Every town and city has its own combination of challenges.

Nicholson also helped Crewe in Cheshire. As a smaller place than Aberdeen, it is focusing on arts, culture and community, with a new women’s centre opened this month.

English councils are also being encouraged to take a more interventionist role.

They can now force an empty commercial unit that has been vacant for at least a year to be offered to tenants through a High Street Rental Auction, even if the landlord does not want to let it.

A noodle bar (left) is one of the new businesses in the area. Parts of the city centre have been undergoing construction work (right)

It is early days, but the threat of losing control of a property is already producing results. Bassetlaw Council in Nottinghamshire, an early adopter of the scheme, says more than 30 shops across the district have been let or are currently under offer because of the policy.

But filling empty units is only part of the problem. The bigger question is what town and city centres are actually for.

Changing habits mean we will not need so many shops. Instead, it is argued, town centres will need more people living and working in them, with new homes and office space alongside services that cannot be done online. With an ageing population, for example, bringing NHS health centres into the heart of a town could be a major opportunity.

In Aberdeen, the building that once housed BHS - a department store that shut in 2016 - is being turned into an entrance plaza for the new food and drink market.

The physical look of Union Street is changing too. Like many Victorian shopping streets, it was built with a wide road, probably to allow room for horses and carriages. Now parts of the pavements are being widened to make it a more pleasant place to spend time, though many Aberdonians are tired of the disruption and of the new traffic restrictions.

Money is a major obstacle. Aberdeen’s new indoor food and drink market is costing £40m, funded by the council and the UK Levelling Up Fund. Elsewhere, regeneration schemes can struggle because redevelopment costs exceed the likely financial return, making public-sector support vital. And the economics are getting tougher.

“Higher interest rates, rising costs of construction and other issues are impacting the viability and delivery of new housing and big redevelopment projects,” says Steve Norris, a director at Lambert Smith Hampton. He says major projects usually need money from both the public and private sectors.

He wants to see “more creative ways of funding”.

Part of Burnham’s plan is to give local leaders more freedom to invest in town centres and drive regeneration, building on the approach he has promoted in Greater Manchester. But large projects take years.

Volunteers have played a role in the redevelopment of Aberdeen’s Union Street

Making it easier and cheaper to open and run a High Street business is one of the more immediate solutions being demanded, with business rates a particular concern.

Burnham has promised further rates reform. All eyes are on this month’s Budget to see how far he will go.

The chief executive of Next, Simon Wolfson, says the bigger issue is not business rates but planning reform.

“The most important thing that the government can do for high streets is let them develop,” says Wolfson, who is also a Conservative peer.

Back in Aberdeen, there are signs of progress.

Lauren Reid and her mother Rose moved their fashion boutique to Union Street in 2024. A council grant helped with the refurbishment after they decided to take the plunge.

Can they make the numbers work? “We’re getting there,” she says.

She feels the same way about the future of her street. “I always say Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Lauren Reid and her mother Rose moved their fashion boutique to Union Street with the help of a council grant

At the moment the area feels like a building site - but another huge gap will soon be filled. Robert Keane is a local property developer who bought the Trinity shopping centre in 2023, once home to Debenhams. The space is now set to be taken over by a national leisure brand. A notoriously exhausting stairway leading to Trinity from the train station is also being replaced by an escalator.

“We saw a real good opportunity, because it was dying,” he says.

He believes he can make it work by cutting parking and overhead costs, resetting rents and being more agile than the previous distant owners.

It was a bold decision, given that Lambert Smith Hampton says more than one in 10 UK shopping centres is suitable for demolition.

But he is betting that Aberdeen’s dynamics are finally changing.

“I think by 2027 it should look and feel like a different city.”

That is certainly the hope. Yet walking along Union Street today, past the boarded-up shopfronts and roadworks, it can still feel like a city caught between its past and whatever comes next.