Our high streets are telling us what might begin, not what is ending. We should stop panicking and start listening.

By Sandra Perez, Managing Consultant

Our high streets these days seem portents of doom, suggesting something fundamental has failed. Headlines warn of Britons who don’t visit their high street regularly and the impact this has on society, politics and sentiment. “Too many empty shops” is an undeniable observation, but it is an incomplete one. Our neighbourhoods and communities need better understanding.

What looks like a retail problem is in fact an issue of how we gather and feel part of something, and how places shape and affect our everyday lives. If we listen differently, we can hear something more important than collapse: rather, an invitation to consider how our high streets might adapt and how government, communities, institutions and businesses like ours can make that happen.

The places beyond bleak headlines have something in common. They are not trying to re-create the past but are reimagining high streets as systems for joyful and meaningful connection, identity, culture and civic life. These places are listening to what people say they actually want from the places they call home. If we listen too, we can seize the opportunity to rethink and reshape in places right across the UK.

At ICC, we’ve spent the last 15 years working within neighbourhoods, coastal towns, rural communities and city centres, and we’ve seen how connection to place is built, lost and rebuilt. High streets aren’t isolated regeneration zones but the front door to community life: spaces where social anchors like libraries, markets and gathering places, service and relationships form a vital, stabilising tissue.

The evidence from this work is more hopeful than the headlines, but meaningful change takes time. A recent report by the Neighbourhoods Commission celebrates programmes like Pride in Place – the programme’s more concentrated, neighbourhood scale is more likely to have tangible impact (even when it still creates winners and losers around the country).

The report also gives us a clear indication of where we need to focus first. Early, visible successes matter. They rebuild trust, demonstrate that change is possible, lay the groundwork and build confidence for longer-term investment – not as cosmetic tweaks, but as steps rooted in the identity, rhythms and aspirations of each place.

A systemic approach

Place leadership is critical to realise the outcomes that are possible. Changing perceptions, economic programming and sentiment won’t happen overnight – and a future of bail-outs is not sustainable. Government funding remains unpredictable and inherently creates winners and losers, particularly when delivered in cycles that don’t reflect the rhythms of real places. And although government grant and public sector intervention is a good thing, it can’t be the only thing.

So the role of public sector stewardship must be about creating the conditions to attract more good action and investment from the whole system – communities, businesses, investors, and institutions – as well as understanding how smaller things contribute toward longer-term, collective missions.

To be fully transformative requires a whole-system approach. The most successful places don’t rely on one big intervention but combine small wins with a systemic approach. They treat every lever – fiscal tools, planning policy, partnership governance, mixed‑use ecosystems – as part of a consistent, coordinated effort to create fertile ground for creativity, community, and economic confidence that attracts more resources and investment. Leveraging even small pockets of resource can yield long‑term impact. We’ve seen it in Weston‑super‑Mare, Barnsley and Altrincham. When identity and atmosphere lead, investment follows. Not grand, one‑off projects, but place‑specific strategies that multiply opportunity.

Sustaining success requires systemic and local action, treating high streets not as problems but as platforms for opportunity. It means extending the functions of our high streets, whether those functions be new homes, co-located services, new cultural anchors, imaginative public spaces, or a broader mix of uses both human and economic. We have to stop pitching high streets against each another and give places flexibility to respond to their own identities, needs, spatial particularities and rhythms.

Our high streets and the people who want to use them deserve more hope. They deserve a story of a place’s possibility, not its decline. If we listen differently, we will hear places tell us what is beginning, not what is ending. And by designing for connection, we can make high streets a core factor in our collective wellbeing.