High Streets - thriving, changing, dying in 2026?

[whole diary]

[Chris from Nailsea]

Ah, Nailsea has a post office. Good.

... at the risk of winding you up even more, so does the (almost) adjoining village of Backwell - population around 6,000. 

CfN^▸ (Chris from Nailsea, an administrator on this forum). 

[Chris from Nailsea]

Bad news from Exmouth, though. 

From the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page):

Exmouth Post Office closure sparks fears for residents

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The Post Office said it hoped to open a replacement branch as soon as possible

People in Exmouth have spoken of their dismay as the town's post office prepares to close, with some warning vulnerable residents could be left struggling to access essential services.

The branch, which operates inside the town's TGJones store - formerly WHSmith, is shutting on Monday as part of a wider closure programme affecting about 150 stores across the UK^▸ (United Kingdom).

The Post Office said it hoped to open a replacement branch as soon as possible, although the process could take about six months.  It said in the meantime customers would be directed to branches at Littleham Cross and Budleigh Salterton.

Kate Wilcox, who campaigned against moving the post office into WHSmith several years ago, said residents had long feared the arrangement would leave the town without a permanent service.  She said: "Exmouth has a population of 36,000 and rising and it's an elderly demographic and quite honestly people need the post office services."

Wilcox said the loss of banks and building societies in recent years had increased the importance of the post office, particularly for people who relied on face-to-face banking and government services.  She said: "The town has been hollowed out by the closure of banks and building societies, the closure of the post office."

Wilcox also warned the closure would be particularly difficult for older and disabled residents who may struggle to travel to alternative branches.  She said: "These are the people that actually need a friendly face to say, all right my love, what can I do?"

(BBC article continues)

[Chris from Nailsea]

Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, putting Post Offices inside branches of WHSmith wasn't such a bright idea, after all? 

[TaplowGreen]

My view from Nailsea (a town of over 20,000 residents):  I'll try to keep this brief, as most of the points have been covered in posts above.

Nailsea High Street is a shadow of what it used to be, when we first moved here, over thirty years ago.  Long gone are the independent family butchers, bakers, greengrocers.

Similarly, long gone are the 'big four' Banks, and Nationwide Building Society, each closing down over the years.  We now have a 'banking hub', sponsored by the Post Office - but that's only available for pre-booked face-to-face appointments with a representative from a bank, not for any financial transactions.

Many of the previous independent shops in the High Street are now Turkish barbers (I've lost count of them), Chinese takeaways (there are now two, after a Chinese restaurant directly across the street from one of them closed), two nail bars and a myriad of charity shops.

Car parking is now subject to a charge, which the feedback I get from my occasional chats with a couple of businesses has had a detrimental effect on their trade.

I think you've done a very good job there of describing the decline of the typical English High Street over the last decade.

The Banks, family owned/better quality retailers (and pubs) are closing/moving online (to be fair in many ways reflecting the behaviour of their customers), and it seems to be accelerating.

But hey, boom time for Turkish barbers and vape shops! 

[grahame]

At the risk of looking just the same as other pictures ... from Swindon last month:



Selling the WHSmith High Street outlets to a company that had closed Claires and Factory Shops has had not unexpected results.   Whilst there are cals for new ventures / subPostmasters to set up, that's not an investment I would encourage friends of family to make.  It may be that there are more premises available if there's the predicted reduction in vape shops, but somehow I would find it hard to trust the company that's inherited a persona from the Horizon scandal, and has now found itself loosing lots of customer serving outlets with the TGJones closures.

[bradshaw]

While Bridport has a few closed shops, in general the High Streets(E, W & S) are in quite good shape. Yes, three of the big four banks have closed -HSBC is now a cafe bar, Nat West is being converted to a gallery and Barclays is a soft furnishing business. We still have TSB and Nationwide.
We have three artisan bakeries, three butchers as well as numerous small, local shops. A bookshop seems to do well despite Waterstones. RKL Tools, a hardware store has just moved to larger premises
Waitrose is on West Street and there is Spar and Premier on East Street. Morrisons, Lidl and Coop are on the edge of the town. Saturdays often sees Marion and I parking at the Coop and walking into town.
We even have a Hatter, Snooks, which still makes them on site. There is also a music store.
The cafe society is thriving with a number of artisan coffee shops preferred to Costa and #1.
There is an arts centre, an Art Deco cinema and a theatre, in an old chapel.
On top of this there is the twice weekly street market.
Trading estates occupy a number of old industrial site not far from the town centre offering a wide range of services.
We also have a busy Post Office

[Mark A]

Bath's most recent iteration of 'Post office'. That aside, you wonder how losing that slew of shops impacts magazine sales.

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[Marlburian]

I made a rare visit into Reading town centre this morning. Within a hundreds yards from where I got off the bus I saw three two-wheelers being ridding illegally on the pavement and got jostled by a girl intent on her mobile phone. I went to Go Outdoors to find that it was closing down in January after a rebrand a year or two ago (a larger store in south Reading closed in 2022). M & S, JD Sports and John Lewis didn't have what I wanted (admittedly very specific items).  Twice I ran the gauntlet of a large team of charity-muggers collecting for a cause I do not support. There was a street musician playing some very loud sounds that I did not like.  There were other cases of anti-social and illegal cycling, in some cases by masked riders. And there were several rough-sleepers lying on the pavement with blankets over their heads.

So an underwhelming experience.  ( I should add that I used to be a very keen cyclist, have generously supported charities, have given £5 and £10 notes to accomplished street musicians, and back in the 1980s twice-daily passed through "Cardboard City" near Waterloo Station.)

On the plus side, I liked the new main library where I spent 90 minutes using a PC faster than my outdated model  (though I could have gone to the branch 20 minutes walk from my home), and the lady bus driver on my trip home was exceptionally pleasant.

[Chris from Nailsea]

See also:

Many years ago, walking in to work in an office in central Bristol, on the pavement, I was startled by the imperious ringing of a bicycle bell behind me.  Instinctively, I stepped to my right - causing the impatient cyclist to also swerve even further to the right.  He thus took a purler, over the handlebars, head first into a pile of empty cardboard boxes outside a shop.  I merely continued my saunter into work, while quietly sniggering to myself. 

CfN^▸ (Chris from Nailsea, an administrator on this forum). 

[WelshBluebird]

Car parking is now subject to a charge, which the feedback I get from my occasional chats with a couple of businesses has had a detrimental effect on their trade.

Although there is quite a lot of research to show that shopkeepers habitually overestimate the number of customers who come by car:

“While only 6.6% of shoppers traveled to the streets by car, on average traders [shopkeepers] estimated 21.6% of their customers use this mode; a discrepancy of 15%… Further they underestimate transit, pedestrian, and bicycle travel by 8.1%, 6.2% and 3% respectively.”

(from https://ggwash.org/view/96602/survey-most-shopkeepers-shoppers-overestimate-car-use, which has lots of interesting links)

To be honest I think 90% of the High Street problem is online shopping. We buy stuff from Amazon and eBay and the like, not Debenhams or BHS or Woolworths. Town centres are just too big for modern shopping habits. The only options are to major on the visitor destination/experience angle - as JohnM says, "having a pedestrianized high street during most of the day made it magnitudes nicer as a place to shop/loiter" - or to shrink the town centre. Much better to turn town centre buildings over to residential use, where the residents might spend time and money in the town centre, than to build acres of new suburbia where the residents will just drive to Tesco.

Exactly this. Of course high streets are struggling - we've replaced them with the internet!
The ones that are managing to do well still are offering something you can't replace digitally. Be that a more niche / independent shopping experience (like on Gloucester Road in Bristol) or by leaning into more cafes / bars / restaurants (again something Gloucester Road has going for it) or by pivoting entirely into things that really do make people want to leave their homes and do in person (which is why you are seeing a lot of these activity bars now, or another Bristol example being the temporary skate park where the old Debenhams used to be that also has some pool tables, pinball machines and is serving some food and drink too).

[Bob_Blakey]

It may be entirely possible that the solution to the loss of banks and/or post offices in smaller population centres is copying the Sidmouth Banking Hub:

https://sidmouth.gov.uk/directory/sidmouth-banking-hub/

In the case of Sidmouth, of course, it helps that the population has a high level of financial clout.

[Marlburian]

Since I wrote above about my trip into Reading, there's been a flurry of posts on the local NextDoor site about pickpockets working in a particular locality in the town centre; they can get very aggressive when challenged. The police "are aware of the situation".