What Have YOU Done for Your High Street Lately?
It’s an uncomfortable question, isn’t it?
Every few months, another headline mourns the death of the British high street.
Empty units. Shuttered banks. Another chain pulling out.
It’s easy to blame landlords, councils or online shopping. It’s harder to look at our own choices.
What have YOU done for your high street lately?
That isn’t intended as a guilt trip. It’s the honest starting point.
Over the past few years, Rachael and I have invested in buildings and backed independent tenants across Sussex, London and the Midlands. In Hurstpierpoint, that has included creating and growing HurstWorks, Wellness34, Lyona and Lyona House.
We’ve restored period buildings, created new spaces and worked with some brilliant independent businesses. We’ve got plenty right. We’ve also made mistakes and learned some expensive lessons along the way.
The biggest lesson is this: no amount of capital, careful architecture or clever tenant mix can revive a high street on its own.
Buildings don’t create community. People do.
And that isn’t unique to Hurst. We’ve seen the same dynamic across very different locations. Property investment can create the opportunity, but whether a place genuinely thrives depends on the relationship between the building, the business inside it and the people living nearby.
This is finally becoming a mainstream political idea. Andy Burnham has described struggling high streets as a “marker of decline” that could instead become a symbol of Britain’s renaissance. His new government is also establishing a “No. 10 North” in Manchester as part of a wider commitment to place, devolution and regional growth.
Whatever you make of the politics, someone at the top is now saying what many of us have argued on the ground for years: place matters, and it’s worth fighting for.
But policy can only take us so far.
Someone still has to walk through the door.
Redevelopment isn’t a rescue mission
There’s a seductive idea that a high street can be saved by the right investment. Knock through a few walls, bring in a coffee roaster and a coworking space, then watch the magic happen.
I believed a version of this myself. I was wrong, or at least only half right.
What I’ve seen, project after project, is that a beautifully redeveloped building without local roots can quickly become a beautiful empty building.
It might look thriving in the launch photographs. It won’t necessarily feel thriving on a wet Tuesday afternoon in February.
The difference between a space that performs well at its opening and one that is still busy eighteen months later usually comes down to whether local people have decided to make it theirs.
That’s uncomfortable for someone in my position, because it means the most important ingredient is the one thing I can’t buy, build or put into a spreadsheet.
What “local people” actually means
“Community” has become one of those words stapled onto so many property brochures that it risks meaning very little.
I don’t mean a mood board, a mission statement or a tasteful photograph of two people holding coffee cups.
I mean specific people doing specific things.
The regular who tells three friends about a new shop rather than simply liking its Instagram post.
The resident who attends a planning consultation and offers something more useful than “I object”.
The person who takes a punt on a first-time trader because they want them to succeed, even if the coffee isn’t yet objectively the best in town.
The customer who gives honest, constructive feedback when something isn’t working instead of quietly giving up and driving to the retail park.
None of this appears in a feasibility study.
All of it helps decide whether a high street lives or dies.
Independent businesses can’t do it alone
Every independent trader who has taken a space with us has done the hard, unglamorous work: the fit-out, the pricing, the recruitment and the late nights.
But none succeeds through effort alone.
They need someone local to trust them before they have a track record. Independent businesses are often particularly fragile during their first year, with thin margins, limited recognition and very little safety net.
Local goodwill can be the thing that gets them through it.
Footfall from outside the town is welcome. Footfall from the postcode is survival.
The appetite certainly appears to be there. The 2026 Voices of Retail research found that 96% of shoppers surveyed wanted more independent shops on their high street, while 85% said they would prefer to spend with a local business rather than a corporate chain.
That isn’t a niche preference. It’s most people.
The gap isn’t desire. It’s follow-through.
Following a local business online is encouraging. Walking through its door and spending a fiver is what makes the difference.
The part nobody particularly wants to hear
If your high street is struggling and you genuinely want it to change, responsibility cannot sit only with developers, councils and landlords.
I’ll happily own my share of it, including the mistakes I’ve made while restoring period buildings in conservation areas. If you want to learn about patience, compromise and unexpected costs, I can thoroughly recommend it.
But some responsibility also sits with everyone who lives within a ten-minute walk.
We can’t complain about empty units while automatically heading to the supermarket or retail park.
We can’t say we want character and independence, then order online every time because it’s marginally easier.
And we can’t expect a thriving high street to provide an attractive backdrop to our town without supporting it through our everyday choices.
That isn’t a criticism of any one person. I’m as capable as anyone of choosing convenience when I’m tired or short of time.
It’s about the gap between what most of us say we want and what we sometimes do. It’s a gap I’ve watched play out in real time, building by building.
What actually works
The high streets genuinely turning a corner tend to share a pattern. We’ve seen it in Hurst and through our buildings and tenants elsewhere in the country.
Redevelopment creates the conditions: better buildings, a thoughtful mix of uses and flexible spaces capable of housing new independent businesses.
Local people convert those conditions into something alive.
They show up. They spend money. They offer feedback. They give new traders a little patience. Most importantly, they treat their high street as a shared project rather than simply a service they’re entitled to receive.
Thoughtful redevelopment can revitalise a building. It can lower the barrier for a first-time business owner and turn a neglected property into somewhere people genuinely want to be.
What it cannot do is manufacture the thing that makes a high street feel like the heart of a town rather than merely a row of shops.
That happens only when the people who live there decide it’s worth the effort.
We now have a Prime Minister who appears to understand that. It’s up to the rest of us to show what place-first thinking looks like in practice.
So, I’ll ask again:
What have YOU done for your high street lately?
It doesn’t need to be grand.
Buy a coffee. Book a class. Work locally for an afternoon. Try the new shop. Recommend an independent business to a friend. Give a new trader useful feedback and a little patience.
You might even discover somewhere rather good.
Because the buildings are the comparatively easy part.
People are the hard part, and the essential one.
Rob & Rachael Fisher together created Better High Streets. From vacant to vibrant, they seek to develop better businesses and high streets, one project at a time...