This article represents the third in series of articles by R3intelligence academics and researchers in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, at Northumbria University, about analysing town and city centre retail markets using GIS and big data. The article was written during a period of enforced Coronavirus (CV-19) self-isolation during which the author had the opportunity of revisit literature on the challenges facing our high streets and town centres, to provide a contemporary perspective of collective knowledge and understanding on the current plight and future prospects of the UK high street post CV-19

Greenhalgh, Paul

English

Northumbria Research Link

Northumbria Research Link
Citation:  Greenhalgh,  Paul  (2020)  HIGH  STREET PROSPECTS  Bounce  back  or  recalibrate?  A 
reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-
19 world. The Terrier, 25 (1). pp. 75-77. 
Published by: Association of Chief Estates Surveyors
URL: https://www.aces.org.uk/publications/ <https://www.aces.org.uk/publications/>
This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/42967/
Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access 
the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the 
individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners.  Single copies of full items can be reproduced, 
displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or 
study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, 
title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata 
page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any  
format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder.  The full policy is available online: 
http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/pol  i cies.html  
This  document  may differ  from the  final,  published version of  the research  and has been made 
available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version 
of the research, please visit the publisher’s website (a subscription may be required.)
                        
HIGH STREET PROSPECTS Bounce back or recalibrate? A reflection on the prospect for UK 
high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world  
ACES Terrier Volume 25(1) pp75-77 Spring 2020 
Author: Paul Greenhalgh 
This article represents the third in series of articles by R3intelligence academics and 
researchers in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, at Northumbria 
University, about analysing town and city centre retail markets using GIS and big data. It was 
written during a period of enforced Coronavirus (CV-19) self-isolation during which the author 
had the opportunity of revisit literature on the challenges facing our high streets and town 
centres and seeks to provide a contemporary perspective of collective knowledge and 
understanding on the current plight, and future prospects, of the UK high street post CV-19.  
 
Reviews 
In the writing of this article, I was drawn, in particular, to the painstaking review by Neil 
Wrigley and colleagues at University of Southampton, of research projects that have sought 
to measure the performance of towns and city centre retailing in order to better understand 
the forces, drivers and behaviours that shape its future. In their 2014 report ‘Evolving High 
Streets: Resilience and Reinvention’, Wrigley and Brookes acknowledged 3 important 
structural forces that represented both a threat and opportunity to UK town centres and high 
streets: 
1. Progressive rise in online shopping  
2. Long term cumulative impact of competition from out of town retail  
3. Progressive shift in consumer behaviour and cultures of consumption.  
 
Online shopping 
 The UK leads the world in online shopping or e-commerce, with internet sales as a percentage 
of all retail sales already breaking 20% before the end of the decade, according to the Office 
of National Statistics. This figure is set to increase further, as a consequence of the temporary 
closure of most non-essential retail and leisure ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets due to Covid-19 
lockdown, compounded by people who are social distancing or self-isolating having little 
choice but to shop on-line. The seemingly inexorable shift from bricks to clicks is predicted, 
by some, to exceed 50% before 2030.  
There is little dispute that high streets in the U.K. will need to adapt to survive. We know we 
have too much retail space, in the wrong format, in the wrong place, and most town and city 
centres in the UK were exhibiting systematic failure and waste of potentially productive 
assets, even before the fall-out from CV-19. The distinction between bricks and mortar and 
e-commerce is diminishing, through click and collect, multi and onmi-channel, showrooming 
and, increasingly, for e-tailers to seek a presence on the high street. So how many physical 
shops does a retailer need in the digital age? Where should they be located? Will the high 
street ever recover? Can high streets bounce back or have we reached a tipping point? 
Perhaps now is the time for a stock take of town and city centres, for a change in their 
trajectory, towards a more civic and societal role, providing a wider range of functional and 
experiential touch points that incorporate enhanced services to improve our well-being. In 
other words, to recalibrate and reorient towards a new future. Secondary and sub-urban 
retail nodes can also serve an important role and function, as society returns to a more stable 
equilibrium of ‘just-in-time’ convenience consumption that offers the prospect of re-
localisation, with increasingly choice edited neighbourhoods providing both functional and 
experiential touch points at the local level.  
The propensity for some locations to recover, and even bounce forward, will depend to a 
great degree on their relative resilience or vulnerability, and more specifically, on their 
adaptive resilience e.g. the fundamentals of places to find new uses for redundant spaces, to 
reabsorb vacant units, that would otherwise blight their surroundings. We are not short of 
intelligence in this regard, as evidenced by the plethora of studies that were undertaken in 
the last decade (see list of sources at end of the article).  
 
Public sector intervention? 
Perhaps given this surfeit of earnest and well-intentioned scrutiny, there is a dawning 
realisation of the limitations of what intervention and planning can deliver. There are 
significant limits as to what can be achieved through planning and development control, in 
relation to the mix and diversity of the town centre offer. Land use planning, via town centre 
first policy, focussed on retailing in isolation, is largely irrelevant. Quite simply, you can’t buck 
the market and you can’t tell consumers how and where to shop. There needs to be a stronger 
reason and purpose for visiting and spending time (and money) in a town or city centre, and 
increasingly politicians and central and local government are looking for quasi autonomous 
organisations, working with local stakeholders, to help manage changes to the structure and 
‘offer’ of town and city centres.  
What we do know is that approaches focused narrowly on land and property development 
have not been successful in improving town centre vitality and viability. Such direct 
interventions are often a nil sum game, with inevitable winners and losers, due to subtle 
shifting of footfall and prime pitch, from one part of the town centre to another, and wider 
displacement or pulling of trade from nearby retail centres.  
The aforementioned report, by Wrigley and Brookes (2014), also proffered 4 ways in which 
social science research could add considerable value, by:  
1. Providing analytical insight to the marked variation in performance of town centres/high 
streets as they adjust  
2. Providing related insight into whether and how drivers of differential performance may 
have varied in scale and position in the retail hierarchy  
3. Providing a conceptual framework that helps make sense of complex variations in 
performance and of the longer-term evolving configurations of high streets  
4. Contributing theoretically informed, evidence based, insight to the development and 
implantation of policy.  
At the time, Wrigley and Brookes’ thinking was framed around the economic fallout from the 
global financial crisis; now it will be how town and city centres recover from the measures 
implemented to halt the spread of CV-19. We need to understand why some high streets are 
better able to recover, to bounce back, and others to slide further into terminal decline. 
Useful insight can be gained from a study of how some of the key drivers, such as the position 
of a retail centre in the retail hierarchy, its role, size, mix, diversity, vacancy, and physical 
configuration influence resilience. This is where benchmarking can come in useful and, in this 
respect, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.  
Benchmarking 
While many indicators of town centre performance are biased towards retail metrics, there 
is still much useful data available with which to track performance. For example, ‘Town 
Benchmarking’, developed by the now defunct Action for Market Towns, comprised 12 KPIs, 
including vacancy rates, retail rents, and car parking provision. GENECON’s (2011) report, for 
the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, recommended 4 KPIs, comprising footfall, 
consumer and business satisfaction, diversity of offer, and consumer spend and business 
turnover. The Association of Town Centre Managers proposed a 2-dimensional approach, 
comprising a first stage personality test linked to a classification matrix, followed by indicators 
grouped around 4 themes - people and footfall, diversity and vitality, consumer and business 
perceptions, and economic characteristics. The Distressed Property Task Force (2013) made 
use of Colliers’ Town Performance Matrix that used demand and supply indicators, such as 
vacancy rates, Zone A rents, catchment area, plus qualitative factors, to place towns into one 
of 5 classifications: thriving; improving; stable; degenerating; failing. In combination with 
footfall and consumer satisfaction, the vacancy rate is perhaps the most powerful ‘tell-tale’ 
of relative resilience or vulnerability of high streets to respond to crisis conditions. The 
persistence of void units, particularly over the medium term (12-24 months) offers the most 
compelling sense of the relative health or distress of a high street or retail location.  
Simplistically, there are 2 types of vacancy - natural, that allows for churn and turnover of 
retail outlets, and structural, linked to over-supply of retail stock and problems with its 
physical configuration. While there are many reasons for vacancy to occur, some are more 
benign, for example, changing retailer requirements, new developments, or a shift in the 
prime pitch, while others are more malign, such as falling footfall and consumer spend, 
leading to fundamental unprofitability, and resulting in business failures. The latter is sadly all 
too apparent due to CV-19 lockdown and, despite government measures aimed at reducing 
overheads and occupancy costs, it is questionable how many businesses on the high street 
will survive. There is little doubt that structural vacancy is set to increase on high streets 
across the UK. How will this be tracked, monitored, reported and evaluated?  
Given that town and city centres are highly complex urban ecosystems, comprising a series of 
markets and submarkets, with a wide range of stakeholders, it is often hard to bridge across 
from benchmarking and performance metrics, to more nuanced appreciation of how these 
factors are playing out ‘on the ground’ over time. What is missing is consistent longitudinal 
place-based analysis with which to both measure performance, and assess resilience or 
vulnerability, at the micro-scale e.g. at high resolution or fine grain.  
Over the last 4 years, R3intelligence has been exploring the potential to use Geographic 
Information System (GIS) software and Valuation Office (VOA) Rating List data, to filter and 
segment millions of non-domestic hereditaments by bulk class, using SCAT codes (see 
aforementioned Terrier articles by Adebayo, Greenhalgh and Muldoon-Smith (Autumn 2017) 
and Ellis and Richardson (Summer 2019)). Such a tool fulfils some of the ambitions of BIS Retail 
Unit’s suggestion of a toolkit for finer grained, street level data collection and analysis.  
The method developed by R3intelligence makes use of data covering all of England and Wales, 
available under licence from the VOA, and covers all retail units, regardless of size or status. 
The technique we have developed avoids the tendency of most retail market analyses to 
ignore secondary and tertiary markets, and smaller units, that are vital to entry level retailers 
and small businesses. A further level of complexity can be introduced by layering in-depth-
map data representing street level configuration and integration, as a proxy for accessibility 
and pedestrian footfall. The GIS can be further enhanced by feeding in vacancy data, typically 
compiled by local authorities, and increasingly available in the public domain, based on empty 
property rates. Such data can then be linked to the base ‘rating list’ data, using unique 
property or address reference numbers. The resulting multi-criteria data model can be used 
to reveal the incidence and concentration of high street voids, in relation to the total stock of 
retail premises, down to postcode level and potentially even finer grain geolocation, using 
individual address fields.  
The data model can be interrogated, at a variety of scales, to offer an illustration and 
interpretation of the complex interaction between demand and supply geographies at street 
level, to track the incidence of voids units, act as a tell-tale of distressed locations, as well as 
identifying those that exhibit greater resilience. The use of GIS software also permits the 
opportunity to layer in other spatial datasets, to provide a richer and more complex portrayal 
of both the characteristics and prospects of individual high streets and secondary and tertiary 
retail nodes.  
For further information about R3intelligence see r3intelligence.co.uk or email 
paul.greenhalgh@northumbria.ac.uk For further illustration of the GIS method developed by 
R3intelligence please refer to Paper #118 ‘Investigating retail space performance through 
spatial configuration of consumer movement: A Comparison of York and Leeds’, in the 
Proceedings of the International Space Syntax Symposium (SSS12) 2019, Beijing, by Adebayo, 
A., Greenhalgh, P. and Muldoon-Smith, K. available at: http://www.12sssbeijing.com/ 
upload/file/1562664603.pdf  
 
References 
Coca-Stefaniak, A. (2013) Successful town centres – developing effective strategies. ATCM. 
London. Available at: https://thegreatbritishhighstreet.co.uk/pdf/  
Successful-Town-Centres.pdf Distressed Town Centre Property Task Force (2013) Beyond 
Retail: redefining the shape and purpose of town centres. Available at: https:// 
thegreatbritishhighstreet.co.uk/pdf/ Beyond-Retail.pdf?2  
Fraser. M. (2013) National Review of Town Centres. Scottish Government. Available at: 
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/ archive/20170701074158/www.gov.scot/ 
Publications/2013/07/7250  
GENECON and LLP (2011) Understanding High Street Performance. Report for Department for 
Business, Innovation and Skills. Available at: https://assets. 
publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ 
file/31824/11-1433-understanding-highstreet-performance-summary.pdf 
Grimsey, B. (2013) The Grimsey Review 1: the vanishing high street. Available at: 
http://www.vanishinghighstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ 
GrimseyReview04.092.pdf  
Grimsey, B. (2018) The Grimsey Review 2: it’s time to reshape our town centres. Available at: 
http://www. vanishinghighstreet.com/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/GrimseyReview2.pdf  
House of Commons (2019) Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee: High 
streets and town centres in 2030; Eleventh report of session 2017-19 HC1010. Available at: 
https://publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/ cmcomloc/1010/1010.pdf  
Office of National Statistics (2020) Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales. Retail 
Sales Index Time Series. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/ 
businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/ timeseries/j4mc/drsi  
Portas, M. (2011) The Portas Review: an independent review into the future of our high 
streets. Available at: https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/the-portasreview-the-
future-of-our-high-streets  
Wrigley, N. and Brookes, E. eds (2014) ‘Evolving High Streets: Resilience and Reinvention: 
perspectives from Social Science’ University of Southampton. Available at: 
https://eprints.soton. ac.uk/371874/1/Opinion_Pieces_ Southampton_Nov_2014.pdf  
Wrigley, N. and Lambiri, D. (2015) British High Streets: from crisis to recovery? University of 
Southampton. Available at: http://www.riben.org.uk/ 
Cluster_publications_&_media/BRITISH%20 HIGH%20STREETS_MARCH2015.pdf 
 


HIGH STREET PROSPECTS Bounce back or recalibrate? A reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world

Northumbria University Research Portal

Northumbria Research LinkCitation:  Greenhalgh,  Paul  (2020)  HIGH  STREET PROSPECTS  Bounce  back  or  recalibrate?  A reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world. The Terrier, 25 (1). pp. 75-77. Published by: Association of Chief Estates SurveyorsURL: https://www.aces.org.uk/publications/ <https://www.aces.org.uk/publications/>This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/42967/Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners.  Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any  format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder.  The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/pol  i cies.html  This  document  may differ  from the  final,  published version of  the research  and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher’s website (a subscription may be required.)                        HIGH STREET PROSPECTS Bounce back or recalibrate? A reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world  ACES Terrier Volume 25(1) pp75-77 Spring 2020 Author: Paul Greenhalgh This article represents the third in series of articles by R3intelligence academics and researchers in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, at Northumbria University, about analysing town and city centre retail markets using GIS and big data. It was written during a period of enforced Coronavirus (CV-19) self-isolation during which the author had the opportunity of revisit literature on the challenges facing our high streets and town centres and seeks to provide a contemporary perspective of collective knowledge and understanding on the current plight, and future prospects, of the UK high street post CV-19.   Reviews In the writing of this article, I was drawn, in particular, to the painstaking review by Neil Wrigley and colleagues at University of Southampton, of research projects that have sought to measure the performance of towns and city centre retailing in order to better understand the forces, drivers and behaviours that shape its future. In their 2014 report ‘Evolving High Streets: Resilience and Reinvention’, Wrigley and Brookes acknowledged 3 important structural forces that represented both a threat and opportunity to UK town centres and high streets: 1. Progressive rise in online shopping  2. Long term cumulative impact of competition from out of town retail  3. Progressive shift in consumer behaviour and cultures of consumption.   Online shopping  The UK leads the world in online shopping or e-commerce, with internet sales as a percentage of all retail sales already breaking 20% before the end of the decade, according to the Office of National Statistics. This figure is set to increase further, as a consequence of the temporary closure of most non-essential retail and leisure ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets due to Covid-19 lockdown, compounded by people who are social distancing or self-isolating having little choice but to shop on-line. The seemingly inexorable shift from bricks to clicks is predicted, by some, to exceed 50% before 2030.  There is little dispute that high streets in the U.K. will need to adapt to survive. We know we have too much retail space, in the wrong format, in the wrong place, and most town and city centres in the UK were exhibiting systematic failure and waste of potentially productive assets, even before the fall-out from CV-19. The distinction between bricks and mortar and e-commerce is diminishing, through click and collect, multi and onmi-channel, showrooming and, increasingly, for e-tailers to seek a presence on the high street. So how many physical shops does a retailer need in the digital age? Where should they be located? Will the high street ever recover? Can high streets bounce back or have we reached a tipping point? Perhaps now is the time for a stock take of town and city centres, for a change in their trajectory, towards a more civic and societal role, providing a wider range of functional and experiential touch points that incorporate enhanced services to improve our well-being. In other words, to recalibrate and reorient towards a new future. Secondary and sub-urban retail nodes can also serve an important role and function, as society returns to a more stable equilibrium of ‘just-in-time’ convenience consumption that offers the prospect of re-localisation, with increasingly choice edited neighbourhoods providing both functional and experiential touch points at the local level.  The propensity for some locations to recover, and even bounce forward, will depend to a great degree on their relative resilience or vulnerability, and more specifically, on their adaptive resilience e.g. the fundamentals of places to find new uses for redundant spaces, to reabsorb vacant units, that would otherwise blight their surroundings. We are not short of intelligence in this regard, as evidenced by the plethora of studies that were undertaken in the last decade (see list of sources at end of the article).   Public sector intervention? Perhaps given this surfeit of earnest and well-intentioned scrutiny, there is a dawning realisation of the limitations of what intervention and planning can deliver. There are significant limits as to what can be achieved through planning and development control, in relation to the mix and diversity of the town centre offer. Land use planning, via town centre first policy, focussed on retailing in isolation, is largely irrelevant. Quite simply, you can’t buck the market and you can’t tell consumers how and where to shop. There needs to be a stronger reason and purpose for visiting and spending time (and money) in a town or city centre, and increasingly politicians and central and local government are looking for quasi autonomous organisations, working with local stakeholders, to help manage changes to the structure and ‘offer’ of town and city centres.  What we do know is that approaches focused narrowly on land and property development have not been successful in improving town centre vitality and viability. Such direct interventions are often a nil sum game, with inevitable winners and losers, due to subtle shifting of footfall and prime pitch, from one part of the town centre to another, and wider displacement or pulling of trade from nearby retail centres.  The aforementioned report, by Wrigley and Brookes (2014), also proffered 4 ways in which social science research could add considerable value, by:  1. Providing analytical insight to the marked variation in performance of town centres/high streets as they adjust  2. Providing related insight into whether and how drivers of differential performance may have varied in scale and position in the retail hierarchy  3. Providing a conceptual framework that helps make sense of complex variations in performance and of the longer-term evolving configurations of high streets  4. Contributing theoretically informed, evidence based, insight to the development and implantation of policy.  At the time, Wrigley and Brookes’ thinking was framed around the economic fallout from the global financial crisis; now it will be how town and city centres recover from the measures implemented to halt the spread of CV-19. We need to understand why some high streets are better able to recover, to bounce back, and others to slide further into terminal decline. Useful insight can be gained from a study of how some of the key drivers, such as the position of a retail centre in the retail hierarchy, its role, size, mix, diversity, vacancy, and physical configuration influence resilience. This is where benchmarking can come in useful and, in this respect, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.  Benchmarking While many indicators of town centre performance are biased towards retail metrics, there is still much useful data available with which to track performance. For example, ‘Town Benchmarking’, developed by the now defunct Action for Market Towns, comprised 12 KPIs, including vacancy rates, retail rents, and car parking provision. GENECON’s (2011) report, for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, recommended 4 KPIs, comprising footfall, consumer and business satisfaction, diversity of offer, and consumer spend and business turnover. The Association of Town Centre Managers proposed a 2-dimensional approach, comprising a first stage personality test linked to a classification matrix, followed by indicators grouped around 4 themes - people and footfall, diversity and vitality, consumer and business perceptions, and economic characteristics. The Distressed Property Task Force (2013) made use of Colliers’ Town Performance Matrix that used demand and supply indicators, such as vacancy rates, Zone A rents, catchment area, plus qualitative factors, to place towns into one of 5 classifications: thriving; improving; stable; degenerating; failing. In combination with footfall and consumer satisfaction, the vacancy rate is perhaps the most powerful ‘tell-tale’ of relative resilience or vulnerability of high streets to respond to crisis conditions. The persistence of void units, particularly over the medium term (12-24 months) offers the most compelling sense of the relative health or distress of a high street or retail location.  Simplistically, there are 2 types of vacancy - natural, that allows for churn and turnover of retail outlets, and structural, linked to over-supply of retail stock and problems with its physical configuration. While there are many reasons for vacancy to occur, some are more benign, for example, changing retailer requirements, new developments, or a shift in the prime pitch, while others are more malign, such as falling footfall and consumer spend, leading to fundamental unprofitability, and resulting in business failures. The latter is sadly all too apparent due to CV-19 lockdown and, despite government measures aimed at reducing overheads and occupancy costs, it is questionable how many businesses on the high street will survive. There is little doubt that structural vacancy is set to increase on high streets across the UK. How will this be tracked, monitored, reported and evaluated?  Given that town and city centres are highly complex urban ecosystems, comprising a series of markets and submarkets, with a wide range of stakeholders, it is often hard to bridge across from benchmarking and performance metrics, to more nuanced appreciation of how these factors are playing out ‘on the ground’ over time. What is missing is consistent longitudinal place-based analysis with which to both measure performance, and assess resilience or vulnerability, at the micro-scale e.g. at high resolution or fine grain.  Over the last 4 years, R3intelligence has been exploring the potential to use Geographic Information System (GIS) software and Valuation Office (VOA) Rating List data, to filter and segment millions of non-domestic hereditaments by bulk class, using SCAT codes (see aforementioned Terrier articles by Adebayo, Greenhalgh and Muldoon-Smith (Autumn 2017) and Ellis and Richardson (Summer 2019)). Such a tool fulfils some of the ambitions of BIS Retail Unit’s suggestion of a toolkit for finer grained, street level data collection and analysis.  The method developed by R3intelligence makes use of data covering all of England and Wales, available under licence from the VOA, and covers all retail units, regardless of size or status. The technique we have developed avoids the tendency of most retail market analyses to ignore secondary and tertiary markets, and smaller units, that are vital to entry level retailers and small businesses. A further level of complexity can be introduced by layering in-depth-map data representing street level configuration and integration, as a proxy for accessibility and pedestrian footfall. The GIS can be further enhanced by feeding in vacancy data, typically compiled by local authorities, and increasingly available in the public domain, based on empty property rates. Such data can then be linked to the base ‘rating list’ data, using unique property or address reference numbers. The resulting multi-criteria data model can be used to reveal the incidence and concentration of high street voids, in relation to the total stock of retail premises, down to postcode level and potentially even finer grain geolocation, using individual address fields.  The data model can be interrogated, at a variety of scales, to offer an illustration and interpretation of the complex interaction between demand and supply geographies at street level, to track the incidence of voids units, act as a tell-tale of distressed locations, as well as identifying those that exhibit greater resilience. The use of GIS software also permits the opportunity to layer in other spatial datasets, to provide a richer and more complex portrayal of both the characteristics and prospects of individual high streets and secondary and tertiary retail nodes.  For further information about R3intelligence see r3intelligence.co.uk or email paul.greenhalgh@northumbria.ac.uk For further illustration of the GIS method developed by R3intelligence please refer to Paper #118 ‘Investigating retail space performance through spatial configuration of consumer movement: A Comparison of York and Leeds’, in the Proceedings of the International Space Syntax Symposium (SSS12) 2019, Beijing, by Adebayo, A., Greenhalgh, P. and Muldoon-Smith, K. available at: http://www.12sssbeijing.com/ upload/file/1562664603.pdf   References Coca-Stefaniak, A. (2013) Successful town centres – developing effective strategies. ATCM. London. Available at: https://thegreatbritishhighstreet.co.uk/pdf/  Successful-Town-Centres.pdf Distressed Town Centre Property Task Force (2013) Beyond Retail: redefining the shape and purpose of town centres. Available at: https:// thegreatbritishhighstreet.co.uk/pdf/ Beyond-Retail.pdf?2  Fraser. M. (2013) National Review of Town Centres. Scottish Government. Available at: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/ archive/20170701074158/www.gov.scot/ Publications/2013/07/7250  GENECON and LLP (2011) Understanding High Street Performance. Report for Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Available at: https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/31824/11-1433-understanding-highstreet-performance-summary.pdf Grimsey, B. (2013) The Grimsey Review 1: the vanishing high street. Available at: http://www.vanishinghighstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ GrimseyReview04.092.pdf  Grimsey, B. (2018) The Grimsey Review 2: it’s time to reshape our town centres. Available at: http://www. vanishinghighstreet.com/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/GrimseyReview2.pdf  House of Commons (2019) Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee: High streets and town centres in 2030; Eleventh report of session 2017-19 HC1010. Available at: https://publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/ cmcomloc/1010/1010.pdf  Office of National Statistics (2020) Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales. Retail Sales Index Time Series. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/ businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/ timeseries/j4mc/drsi  Portas, M. (2011) The Portas Review: an independent review into the future of our high streets. Available at: https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/the-portasreview-the-future-of-our-high-streets  Wrigley, N. and Brookes, E. eds (2014) ‘Evolving High Streets: Resilience and Reinvention: perspectives from Social Science’ University of Southampton. Available at: https://eprints.soton. ac.uk/371874/1/Opinion_Pieces_ Southampton_Nov_2014.pdf  Wrigley, N. and Lambiri, D. (2015) British High Streets: from crisis to recovery? University of Southampton. Available at: http://www.riben.org.uk/ Cluster_publications_&_media/BRITISH%20 HIGH%20STREETS_MARCH2015.pdf  

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HIGH STREET PROSPECTS Bounce back or recalibrate? A reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world

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