Submitted by Bill Fernie
29th September 2026
Walk through almost any British town centre and you can see the evidence of change.
There are empty shops where there were once businesses. The names on shopfronts have changed. Some familiar trades have disappeared altogether. People still go into town, but increasingly they go for a particular service, an appointment, a coffee or a quick purchase rather than spending an afternoon shopping.
At the same time, governments and councils are spending millions trying to improve town centres.
New paving is laid. Streets are redesigned. Lighting is improved. Trees and planters appear. Public spaces are created.
All of these things can make a town a better place.
But there is a more difficult question that perhaps deserves more attention:
Are we trying to save Britain's towns without properly planning their future?
Wick provides an interesting case study.
Highland Council is currently investing £2.1 million in a major streetscape project covering parts of Bridge Street, the High Street and Market Square. The scheme includes wider pavements, improved cycling infrastructure, new public spaces, lighting, planting, accessible parking, wayfinding and artwork. The council says the aim is to make Wick more welcoming, attractive and pedestrian friendly.
There is nothing wrong with that.
The difficulty is that a town centre can be physically improved while becoming economically weaker.
New paving cannot create a town-centre economy.
That requires people, jobs, households, spending and reasons to visit.
And this is not just a Wick problem.
The Office for National Statistics found in its latest analysis that employment in central high streets and shopping centres fell more sharply between 2015 and 2024 than in non-central high streets and retail parks. Within central high streets, retail employment fell by 19%, while accommodation and food services employment increased by 18%.
That tells us something important.
The town centre is not necessarily disappearing.
It is changing.
The problem is that much of the physical town was designed for a different economic age.
The town centre that used to exist
Wick, like many other towns, once had an economic ecosystem that generated its own footfall.
People worked locally. They were paid locally. They lived locally. Their children went to local schools. They bought food, clothes, furniture, electrical goods and other products locally. They used garages, pubs, cafés, tradespeople and professional services.
The town centre benefited from all of this activity.
Take away enough of the underlying economic activity and the consequences spread.
A workplace closes or moves.
There are fewer employees.
Fewer people spend money in town.
A shop loses turnover.
It closes.
Now there is one less reason to visit.
Another business struggles.
A building becomes vacant.
The town becomes less attractive to investors.
And the cycle continues.
This is not simply a retail problem. It is an economic problem.
Wick has seen major changes in its employment base over decades, including the reduction and relocation of government and other secure employment.
The loss of a few hundred jobs can have a much larger effect than the number initially suggests.
A well-paid employee is not simply one job.
It may mean a household, children at school, a mortgage or rent, a car, shopping, meals out, tradespeople and years of local spending.
The reverse is also true.
When secure employment disappears, the spending disappears with it.
That is why regeneration which concentrates mainly on buildings and streets risks starting at the wrong end.
Perhaps we have been asking:
How do we make the town centre more attractive?
when the first question should be:
What is going to bring people into this town and give them a reason to stay?
The internet has changed the rules
There is another problem which no amount of public investment can reverse.
People no longer need to go into town to buy many of the things they once bought there.
Electrical goods can be ordered online. Clothes can arrive at the front door. Books can be delivered within days or even hours. Furniture, groceries and almost everything else compete with the physical shop.
Out-of-town retail has also changed the economics.
Large stores can offer extensive car parking and shoppers can drive directly to the door.
The internet has no parking charge at all.
The government has recognised this problem for years. Its Future High Streets Fund acknowledged that online shopping and out-of-town retail had fundamentally changed the way town centres work and argued that successful centres would increasingly need to combine shops with homes, offices, services and leisure.
More recent government analysis has gone further, describing the shift online and to out-of-town retail as a major cause of falling footfall and increasing vacancy.
Scotland's planning policy is also explicit that town centres should contain a mixture of uses including retail, leisure, entertainment, recreation, cultural and community facilities, homes and businesses. The Scottish Government's Town Centre First approach also gives priority to significant footfall-generating uses such as offices, healthcare, education and public buildings being located in existing centres where appropriate.
In other words, the policy documents already contain much of the answer.
The question is whether we are acting on it quickly enough.
Perhaps the future town centre is smaller
There may be an uncomfortable conclusion.
Perhaps Wick does not need to fill every shop that once existed.
Perhaps it needs a smaller, denser and more useful centre.
Some buildings may be worth preserving. Others may be capable of being converted. Some may be so expensive to modernise that rebuilding makes more economic sense.
That does not mean destroying a town's heritage.
It means being realistic about which buildings can have a useful future.
A modern town centre could contain fewer conventional shops but more homes, offices, healthcare, education, cafés, restaurants, professional services, community facilities, leisure and public services.
An empty upper floor might become a home.
A large obsolete shop could become offices or accommodation.
A building that cannot economically be saved might eventually need to be replaced.
The objective should not necessarily be to recreate the Wick of 1970, 1980 or 2000.
It should be to create a Wick that works in 2035, 2040 and 2050.
But where will the people come from?
This is where the debate becomes much bigger than town-centre design.
A town needs an economic engine.
For Wick and Caithness, that means asking what employment will support the population in the decades ahead.
Dounreay remains a major employer, but decommissioning is by definition a long-term process rather than an endlessly expanding industry.
Agriculture has become dramatically more productive while requiring fewer people.
Fishing has changed enormously from the days when Wick was one of Europe's great herring ports.
Retail has changed.
Government employment has changed.
Telecommunications have changed.
The challenge is therefore not simply finding the next shop.
It is finding the next generation of households.
That may require thinking much more seriously about the role of national government.
Why should every government department, every new public service function and every expanding administrative operation automatically gravitate towards the largest cities?
Could some future government work be deliberately located in places such as Wick?
It does not necessarily require a giant department.
A few hundred secure, reasonably well-paid jobs could make a considerable difference to a small economy if they resulted in permanent households rather than a succession of short-term workers.
And the jobs of the future do not necessarily have to involve smokestacks.
They could involve software development, digital government, cybersecurity, engineering design, data analysis, environmental modelling, research and specialist technical services.
The technology now exists for many forms of professional work to be carried out almost anywhere with good digital infrastructure.
That should change the way we think about rural economic development.
Planning for 2050 rather than repairing 1990
There is an even bigger question.
Britain knows that its population is ageing. It knows that climate change will affect where and how people live. It knows that transport, energy and digital infrastructure are changing.
Yet much of our town-centre debate still appears to concentrate on replacing what has disappeared.
Perhaps the starting point should be different.
What will Wick need in 2050?
How many people might live there?
What sort of jobs will they have?
Where will young families live?
Where will teenagers meet?
How will older people access services?
How will doctors, nurses, teachers and other professionals be attracted to the area?
How much housing will be required?
Which buildings should be preserved?
Which should be converted?
Which might eventually be replaced?
And what national investment will be required to make all of that possible?
These are not questions that can be answered by another coat of paving.
They require economic planning.
We have been planning town centres for years
There is also a danger of consultation fatigue.
People do not necessarily object to consultation.
They object when consultation appears to replace decision-making.
Britain has been discussing the future of high streets for years. The Mary Portas Review was published in 2011. Government programmes and funds have followed it. There have been further reviews, strategies, consultations and regeneration schemes.
The Scottish Government itself says town centres need to become more diverse, sustainable and thriving places in which people can live, work and enjoy themselves.
So perhaps the next stage should be different.
Before asking people another general question about what they want their town to look like, there could be a serious technical exercise.
What buildings are economically viable?
What buildings are structurally sound?
Where could housing go?
Where could offices go?
What public services could be located in the centre?
What parking is actually required?
What would three different redevelopment options cost?
And most importantly, what economic activity would make each option sustainable?
Give people two or three properly costed choices rather than another blank sheet of paper.
Then make a decision.
Britain needs to decide what its towns are for
The problem facing Wick is not unique.
Across Britain, traditional town centres are being reshaped by online shopping, out-of-town retail, changing employment patterns, ageing populations and different lifestyles.
The ONS evidence shows that retail employment is declining in central high streets while other activities are taking its place.
That may actually offer hope.
The future town centre does not have to be a shopping centre.
It could become something more useful.
But that requires us to stop measuring success simply by asking how many shops are open.
A successful town might have fewer shops than it did 30 years ago but more people living there, more professional jobs, better public services, more cafés and leisure, stronger community activity and a healthier local economy.
The challenge is to build that future deliberately rather than waiting for it to happen by accident.
For Wick, the £2.1 million streetscape investment can improve the physical environment.
But the harder question comes afterwards.
Where are the jobs?
Where are the families?
Where are the young people?
Where is the investment that will generate the spending?
And where is the long-term national plan for places such as Caithness?
Perhaps the question is not how we bring yesterday's town centre back.
Perhaps it is whether we have started planning for the town we will need in 2050.
Because if Britain continues trying to save its towns by repairing their buildings without rebuilding their economic foundations, we may eventually discover that we have created beautifully improved town centres that still have too few reasons for people to visit them.
**New paving can improve a town.
Only people, jobs and economic activity can give it a future.**