I’d be interested to see this broken down on whether the high street has been pedestrianised or not. There’s high streets that are a busy road with shops, which I would avoid, and those that have been pedestrianised and are actually places where you can spend some time.

My pie in the sky dream would be for councils to buy high street shops, land and all, and rent them back with rent caps to small business owners. No more sky high business rates to worry about. Encourage small and medium size businesses to set up and grow their business up to a certain amount of turnover a year. Maybe that might reverse the trend in businesses abandoning the high street because there’s no customers and customers abandoning the high street because the prices are sky high?

But who am I fooling? I live in Bristol and what we need is the council to fund building of a mega arena not even inside Bristol 🤷.