When Mike Ashley calls a politician’s urban renewal blueprint delusional, the retail commentariat nods along like beaten spaniels. Andy Burnham wants to rescue Greater Manchester’s town centres with pedestrianization, culture-led regeneration, and public transport integration. Ashley, billionaire bruiser of Sports Direct and Frasers Group, barks that you cannot pedestrianize your way to prosperity if customers cannot park their hatchbacks right outside the shop door.
Both men are trapped in the past.
Burnham is peddling a nostalgic municipal fairy tale where craft bakeries and indie bookshops save the day through sheer community grit. Ashley is clinging to an equally tired big-box dogma that treats the high street as a parking lot with a roof.
I have watched retail executives burn billions trying to appease motorists who stopped showing up a decade ago, just as I have watched mayors throw millions at artisan cheese markets that cannot generate the footfall to cover their own waste collection. The lazy consensus says the high street is dying because of business rates, parking charges, or online shopping. That is a comforting lie. The high street is dying because we are trying to preserve a 1950s zoning experiment in a 2026 digital economy.
The Parking Fallacy
Let us dismantle Ashley’s core thesis first. The retail tycoon argues that free, abundant parking is the lifeblood of high street commerce. Take away the tarmac, he warns, and shoppers flee to out-of-town retail parks.
The data says otherwise, but more importantly, human behavior says otherwise.
People do not avoid town centres because they have to walk two hundred yards from a multi-storey. They avoid them because strip malls offer predictability, zero friction, and standardized curation. When a high street relies entirely on car dependency, it competes directly with Trafford Centre or Cribbs Causeway on their own turf—and loses every single time. Out-of-town sheds do concrete better than any Victorian town centre ever could.
Imagine a scenario where every council in the country immediately caps parking fees and guts bus lanes to appease suburban drivers. Does footfall return to pre-2010 levels? No. Because the department stores anchoring those streets are gone, the banks are shuttered, and the consumer has changed. You cannot engineer a retail renaissance by pandering to the logistics of a Ford Cortina.
Burnham understands that transport integration matters, but his obsession with civic beautification misses the structural reality of modern commercial density. Paving over a road and planting birch trees does not magically create purchasing power.
The Artisan Delusion
On the other side of the ideological ledger, we have the municipal planners who believe every failing high street can be saved by a collective of candle-makers, vegan zero-waste refillery outlets, and a micro-brewery operating out of an old railway arch.
This is gentrification cosplay.
You cannot sustain a local economy on sourdough bread and flat whites sold to remote workers who pop out during their midday Zoom break. It creates a fragile micro-economy that collapses the second interest rates tick up or discretionary spending tightens.
Real urban vibrancy requires friction, density, and mixed-use entropy. For decades, planning laws have separated where we live, where we work, and where we buy things into neat, sterile little boxes. That is the exact opposite of how thriving human settlements have functioned for millennia.
Look at successful European urban models. They do not survive because mayors hand out grants to hipster cooperatives. They survive because residential density sits directly above, behind, and beside commercial storefronts. When thousands of people live within a three-minute walk of a high street, you do not need to bribe motorists with free parking or subsidize pottery classes. The customers are already there, trapped by gravity and convenience.
The Real Estate Rot
The elephant in the room that neither Burnham nor Ashley wants to address with intellectual honesty is the structural collapse of commercial leasehold valuations.
Commercial landlords would rather let a high street unit sit empty for five years as a tax write-off than drop the rent to a level that reflects actual market demand. Institutional property portfolios are built on asset values derived from historical rent rolls. If a landlord cuts the rent on a prime high street shop from eighty thousand pounds a year down to twenty thousand pounds to attract an innovative local business, the valuation of their entire debt-encumbered property portfolio takes a catastrophic hit.
So the shops stay shuttered. Steel shutters roll down at five o'clock, steel mesh goes over the windows, and the street rots from the inside out.
Business rates compound this insanity. The current taxation system penalizes physical storefronts while giving digital giants a structural subsidy. A warehouse in a Bedfordshire industrial park pays a fraction of the business rates per square foot compared to a high street fashion boutique in Bolton, despite utilizing the same national transport infrastructure.
Ashley knows this intimately. His entire business model thrives on snapping up distressed retail assets out of administration for pennies on the dollar, squeezing suppliers, and treating real estate as a short-term cash register rather than a community asset. Burnham knows it too, but local authorities have zero fiscal leverage to reform property taxation without central government intervention.
Stop Fixing What You Do Not Understand
If we want to rescue our town centres, we have to stop treating them as museums of retail history.
First, slash business rates for physical storefronts to zero and replace them with a digital fulfillment levy on last-mile package delivery. Force online logistics giants to pay the true cost of urban congestion. If a consumer wants a pair of trainers delivered to their door within two hours, price that convenience to reflect the wear and tear on the public realm.
Second, convert empty retail space into residential housing by force if necessary. Compulsory purchase orders should target landlords who leave units vacant for more than twelve months. Stop waiting for a major department store anchor to return from the dead. They are never coming back. Fill those footprints with GP surgeries, micro-gyms, co-working spaces, and apartments.
Third, stop asking whether cars or bikes save the high street. Neither does. People save the high street, and people only inhabit spaces where they can afford to live.
Burnham is tinkering at the edges with aesthetic vanity projects. Ashley is defending a business model optimized for an era of cheap oil and suburban expansion that expired years ago.
The high street does not need saving. It needs a funeral for its past and a brutal, unromantic eviction of everyone who refuses to let it evolve into something unrecognizable.
