The high street is in crisis. How did we get here and what happens next? The global pandemic has made the crisis immeasurably worse but it wasn’t the cause. The crisis was already raging in 2019 with thousands of store closures. Large retailers became complacent and failed to respond to changing consumer behaviour. Town centres are the victims of these changes rather than the cause of them. To understand the current crisis and how it might be addressed, this book takes a long view of retailing based on a hundred case studies. It looks at the way town centres responded to previous crises and explores current trends affecting town centres and how places are responding. The message is optimistic: adaptable town centres can once more become the diverse, characterful, independent places that existed before they were homogenised by big retail. Explore the past – understand the present – find a better future.