R.I.P The High Street

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Image © Kel Harvey 2020 -

 Another nail in the coffin of High Street retail. Debenhams, Bangor starts its everything must go sale. This store was the cornerstone and erstwhile flagship of the Menai Shopping Centre, which itself has only been going for just over a decade and to this date still has empty units from day one. Yet another vanity project going the same way as The Wellfield Centre that it replaced. Meanwhile, there is probably only a tiny handful of locally-owned retail spaces anywhere in the city and only one of those, as far as I can recollect, has been there since we first moved to North Wales and its days look set to be numbered.

The pandemic has thrown the weaknesses of corporate retail into sharp relief. It has also revealed the ugly face of poor business practice, profiteering and asset-stripping that characterises so many of the large-scale retail groups. In common with the do-it-all contracting firms like Serco, they've leeched the life-blood out of what were thriving town and city centres, where firms small and large co-existed and thrived happily; and now, Covid-world has pulled the rug out from under their business models and they are in turn, pulling the plug on thousands of jobs and clawing as much out of the debris as they can before the banks start foreclosing on them: leaving a sodding-great hole where we used to have a High Street.

When we were at James' and Leo's place for the fish supper the other day, we were half watching 'Passport To Pimlico', one of my all-time favourite films from the great era of home-grown British Cinema. Maybe the way to rebuild our High Streets is for ordinary folk to stick two fingers up to the corporate rats deserting the retail ship and the authorities who encouraged this despoliation in the first place, and to employ a bit of old-fashioned anarchy, in the truest sense of the word, and reclaim The High Street. No other bugger will do owt.

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