Readers respond to an article about the decline of town centres
Sammy Gecsoyler’s report from Rotherham (‘It’s just vape shops, nail shops, charity shops’: can anything save the British high street?, 4 November) tells the story in its dates. One out-of-town retail park in Britain in 1981; 385 by 1996. Parkgate opened in 1987 and MPs warned that it would disembowel towns and villages. It did. Rotherham town centre is now 24% vacant, while retail park vacancy nationally sits at 4.8%. That is not a mystery. It is 40 years of planning policy.
We have since gone one step further by making home delivery cheaper than retail parks. Up to 3bn parcels a year now land on British doorsteps and not one of them passes through a town centre.
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