Five ways to save Britain’s struggling high streets

The high street, or the main shopping area, has always been the heart of any UK town or city. But over the last ten years, it’s significance has dwindled. Over 28,000 stores have closed, and footfall has been on a “relentless downward trend”. While commentators often blame store closures on online shopping and poor footfall on the weather, our research uncovered a rather different problem

Review of foundational concepts and emerging directions in metamaterial research: Design, phenomena, and applications

In the past two decades, artificial structures known as metamaterials have been found to exhibit extraordinary material properties that enable the unprecedented manipulation of electromagnetic waves, elastic waves, molecules, and particles. Phenomena such as negative refraction, bandgaps, near perfect wave absorption, wave focusing, negative Poissons ratio, negative thermal conductivity, etc., all are possible with these materials. Metamaterials were originally theorized and fabricated in electrodynamics, but research into their applications has expanded into acoustics, thermodynamics, seismology, classical mechanics, and mass transport. In this Research Update we summarize the history, current state of progress, and emerging directions of metamaterials by field, focusing the unifying principles at the foundation of each discipline. We discuss the different designs and mechanisms behind metamaterials as well as the governing equations and effective material parameters for each field. Also, current and potential applications for metamaterials are discussed. Finally, we provide an outlook on future progress in the emerging field of metamaterials.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

High Street UK 2020 Project Report

The purpose of this document is to report the progress of the High Street UK2020 (HSUK2020) project. Started in January 2014, HSUK2020 aims to bring evidence to 10 UK High Streets, to improve local decision making that will improve vitality and viability. The 10 partner locations are Alsager, Altrincham, Ballymena, Barnsley, Bristol (St George), Congleton, Holmfirth, Market Rasen, Morley and Wrexham. The report outlines the background to the project, the methods we have employed, the results we have found and a brief overview of how some of our partner towns are using these findings. By undertaking a systematic review of the literature and, through adopting a more ‘engaged’ model of scholarship, the project has identified 201 factors that influence the performance of the UK High Street. This has enabled us to classify the top 25 priorities for action our partner towns should focus on

Towns and Cities as Multifunctional Centres

Whilst omni-channel retailing and the digital high street may be two of the latest talking points in the retail property industry, our towns and city centres have always been shaped by a series of technological, social and political revolutions. The purpose of this report is to examine how, after many years of mono-functionality focused upon retailing, our centres are experiencing something of a renaissance, and remerging as multi-functional ones, supporting leisure and recreation, employment, tourism, heritage, culture, housing, employment, education, health and wellbeing as well as retail. A multi-functional centre means a diverse offer, and, therefore, traditional economic indicators will not, on their own, act as a sensible yardstick of performance or tool for decision-making. For the multi-functional centre, activity levels are the key performance indicators. How much is the centre used, when and for what? Multi-functional centres draw people in for a much wider ‘bundle of benefits’ than just shopping. This requires all stakeholders to work together much more effectively to deliver a better collective experience in locations, to the commuter who may want to choose and collect at different times of the day, depending on their personal transport options and shift patterns, to the carer who may want to combine exercise and top-up shopping near to reliable respite care. Many of the newfound uses for underused or redundant retail space have resulted from structural changes in the retail sector, as well as from a more tightly gripped public purse. This has opened up the possibility for much more community involvement in the redevelopment and reuse of space. Sometimes this influx of creativity is only temporary, but it still demonstrates what an important asset an engaged community can be to a place, and what a difference it can make to vitality and viability. We think the retail property sector should work harder to integrate more local entrepreneurship and civic practice into both the development of new centres and the management of existing ones. The successful multi-functional centre will have both a multitude of users as well as a multitude of caretakers. Most of all, our report argues that all retail developments (both new and existing) have to integrate more effectively into the overall offer of the multi-functional centre. Decision making and management must become less hierarchical and myopic and more place-based and ‘porous’ to allow more intelligence and input from the location

High Street UK 2020 Interim Project Report: Identifying factors that influence vitality and viability

The purpose of this document is to report the progress of the High Street UK2020 (HSUK2020) project. Started in January 2014, HSUK2020 aims to bring evidence to 10 UK High Streets, to improve local decision making that will improve vitality and viability. The 10 partner locations are Alsager, Altrincham, Ballymena, Barnsley, Bristol (St George), Congleton, Holmfirth, Market Rasen, Morley and Wrexham. The report outlines the background to the project, the methods we have employed, the results we have found and a brief overview of how some of our partner towns are using these findings. By undertaking a systematic review of the literature and, through adopting a more ‘engaged’ model of scholarship, the project has identified 201 factors that influence the performance of the UK High Street. This has enabled us to classify the top 25 priorities for action our partner towns should focus on