Jess Craig
Policy Manager
For many of us, department stores have long held an association with Christmas. Transformed into winter wonderlands for the festive season, they’ve served as important spaces to buy presents, get together with friends and even meet Santa Claus, for generations of British shoppers. But changing trends in how we shop mean we’re no longer flocking to department stores.
The decline of the department store
New polling by More in Common for Power to Change suggests that just 7% of people will be doing most of their Christmas shopping in department stores this year – compared to the 44% who say they’ll be shopping online. This suggests not even the magic of Christmas can save our department stores from decline.
The growth of out-of-town retail and shift to online shopping have contributed to an 85% decrease in the number of ‘traditional’ department stores on Britain’s high streets over the past decade. Meanwhile, household brands like Marks & Spencer and John Lewis continue to downsize their high street stores as they see an increasing proportion of their sales move online. With an oversupply of retail on most British high streets, shuttered department stores need to be reimagined to revive their role as much loved national institutions.
Community-led solutions
Across the country, multiple new and creative uses for department stores are emerging, which blend their history as retail spaces with new uses as cultural hubs, workspaces, and NHS clinics. Communities are also helping to reimagine their department stores which give them a new life and reinstate their position as important town centre social spaces.
Our new report, Department stories: How communities are reimagining a national institution, explores four examples of community–led reuse of department stores and town centre shopping spaces. It highlights the opportunity to transform former department stores into mixed-use spaces which meet local needs and drive footfall back to our high streets, contributing to local regeneration
The report highlights how community businesses are innovating the department store model to deliver more than just retail. In Bristol, Sparks has transformed a former Marks & Spencer into an accessible town centre destination for sustainability education and ethical shopping, while in Dewsbury, a grade II listed Victorian arcade is being revived to provide space for local entrepreneurship.
Community businesses are also reimagining department stores as an accessible and central space to meet other local needs. In Southend, the Haven Community Hub is delivering support for older residents, including a dementia day centre, while Department in Ryde, Isle of Wight, will provide a central cultural and creative hub.
Towards a civic high street
Community businesses are helping to create a new civic model for the high street by reviving the role that department stores once played in creating social connection. They are responding to the significant demand for space to meet and connect, and for activities and services on the high street at low or no cost.
In 2025, we’ll be exploring how communities can deliver a new civic identity for their high streets with our cohort of Community Led High Street Innovators, developing new solutions to challenges of ownership and governance on the high street.
With the new Government’s high street policy agenda gaining momentum with the introduction of new ‘right to rent’ powers for high streets earlier this month, the report outlines the opportunity for policymakers to back community-led reuse of department stores. Communities can offer a solution to the problem of vacant town centre spaces that no longer fit the retail-focused purpose for which they were designed. But, to do this, they need a supportive policy landscape that empowers them to create the civic high streets of the future and to steward high street assets through community ownership.
While many of us are trading our trips to the high street for online shopping this Christmas, the department store doesn’t have to be a Ghost of Christmas Past. The community led reimagination of these spaces can ensure their role in a thriving high street for future generations to come.
