It is a transformation which will make the northeast town of Stockton-on-Tees almost unrecognisable – and which may, advocates say, signal a new future for British towns and cities.

Next year, the sprawling Castlegate shopping centre, which has dominated the high street here for half a century, will be demolished and replaced with a vast public park three times the size of Trafalgar Square.

The mall’s multi-storey car park and dozens of shops, as well as an adjacent hotel, will be bulldozed into history. In their place will come one of the North of England’s biggest urban oases: five acres of grassed lawns, wild habitats, play areas and picnic spots.

If the £37m vision – set to be officially approved next week – is unequivocally bold, it is only the most notable of a whole raft of similar projects currently being green-lit by various local authorities.

Across the UK, such outdoor spaces are being planned on sites previously earmarked for commercial development. In Sheffield, the 1.5-acre Pound Park is to be created where a car park and offices were previously pencilled in. In Leeds, the proposed Aire Park – part of a wider development of apartments and hotels – will become the city’s biggest new green space since the Victorian age. In Manchester, readjusted plans to regenerate the old Mayfield railway depot will now see a 6.5-acre oasis at its heart, albeit one surrounded by high-rise towers.

It all raises an intriguing prospect: after decades when the prevailing trend has been one of loss, could we now be seeing the first signs of a new golden age of park building? And could such facilities be key to transforming the flagging fortunes of our urban centres?

A string of household names were lost this year as Covid accelerated changes to the high street

2020 was a punishing year for the high street, with 177,000 jobs lost as a string of household names succumbed to administration during Covid-19. The pandemic has accelerated the painful restructuring of an industry that is a big employer but where fewer physical stores are needed to serve shoppers in the internet age. Here are some of the biggest retail collapses throughout 2020.

Debenhams

1 December With no rescue deal agreed, the troubled chain started closing down sales in its 124 stores before Christmas, as it announced plans to liquidate. About 4,000 head office and store jobs have already gone as a result of its second administration in a year and its 12,000 remaining staff face an uncertain future.

Arcadia

30 November The collapse into administration of Sir Philip Green’s fashion group affected 13,000 jobs. The Arcadia brands, which include Topshop, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins, are being auctioned off. So far only the plus-size label Evans has changed hands but all its outlets are to close, meaning hundreds of job losses. Arcadia had already cut 500 head-office jobs in the summer of 2020.

Edinburgh Woollen Mill Group

The fashion group, with 21,500 staff, owned by the entrepreneur Philip Day, fell into financial crisis in the autumn. Its brands – Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Ponden Mill, Peacocks, Jaeger, Austin Reed and Jacques Vert – followed each other into administration and it has cut 860 jobs so far.

M&Co

5 August The Renfrewshire-based clothing retailer, formerly known as Mackays, was restructured via a pre-pack administration. The move resulted in the closure of 47 of 215 stores and 400 job losses.

Harveys

30 June The furniture chain went under, with the administrators announcing an initial wave of 240 redundancies among its workforce of 1,500.

TM Lewin

30 June The shirtmaker called in the administrators. It closed all 66 of its outlets permanently, with the loss of about 600 jobs.

Monsoon Accessorize

11 June The fashion brands were bought out of administration by their founder, Peter Simon, in a deal that resulted in the closure of 35 stores and 545 job losses.

Oasis and Warehouse

15 April All stores closed after the fashions brands went into administration, resulting in 1,800 job losses. The brands were subsequently sold to the online fashion group Boohoo.

Cath Kidston

21 April More than 900 jobs were cut at Cath Kidston’s retro retail label when a rescue deal brokered for the business closed all 60 of its UK stores.

Laura Ashley

17 March The chain went into administration, with 2,700 job losses, after rescue talks were scuppered by the pandemic. It was acquired by the Gordon Brothers investment firm and is set to make a return through a partnership with Next.

Rutland has lost its status as the only county in Britain without a McDonald’s restaurant.

At a council meeting last night, the planning and licensing committee voted to approve an application for a 24-hour drive-through restaurant on the outskirts of Oakham.

McDonald’s had said its plans had attracted a “great reception” and would create jobs.

However, not everyone was “lovin’ it”, to use the burger chain’s motto. The rural East Midlands county, England’s smallest, received 55 objections before the decision was granted.

These included a letter from a boy of ten who pointed out how much sugar there was in a milkshake and claimed that “the town will be destroyed”. 

The Towns Fund has introduced the prospect of a huge and welcome allocation of new funding for towns but the three core programmes at its heart, urban regeneration, skills and connectivity have very little direct link to retail and will require some innovative thinking if they are to support it.

My gut reaction is that I fear in 2021 we will be having the same discussion about the slow death of town based retail as we are today on the cusp of 2020! This story tells us:

UK high streets have shed more than 140,000 jobs this year as store closures and retail failures made 2019 one of the most challenging years in a generation.

More than 2,750 jobs were lost every week, according to a detailed analysis by the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) published today. It predicts the picture will worsen in 2020, unless the government intervenes, with high business rates one of the factors blamed for accelerating chain store closures.

Prof Joshua Bamfield, the CRR’s director, said retail was in crisis owing to high costs, low levels of profitability and sales moving online.

“These problems are felt by most businesses operating from physical stores in high streets or shopping malls,” Bamfield said. “The low growth in consumer spending since 2015 has meant that the growth in online sales has come at the expense of the high street.”

A hardship charity once chaired by Charles Dickens has received a 30% increase in requests for help from struggling shop workers as the high street crisis bites.

The Fashion and Textile Children’s Trust steps in to assist children whose parents work in the fashion industry but are struggling to make ends meet. The surge in requests for its grants in 2019, included a “significant” increase in inquiries from people who were being made redundant from stores.

Anna Pangbourne, the director of the charity, said: “With retailers collapsing, many people have been made redundant, which is very raw for the families involved, particularly at this time of year.”

The charity offers grants to parents who cannot afford essentials for their children. In most cases, families need the cash to buy winter clothing and shoes or to replace broken appliances. It also extends grants to families coping with hardship after a redundancy.

Since Doug Putman rescued UK music retailer HMV in February, he has thrown himself wholeheartedly into running a transatlantic retail empire. The Canadian businessman has found himself jetting back and forth between his Ontario-based Sunrise Records chain and his newer acquisition.

On average, he spends one week a month in the UK. “I must do about 500,000 air miles a year,” he says.

Now he faces his latest challenge, the all-important Christmas period.

“That’s crunch time,” he says. “All the hard work you do for 10 months of the year, that period is when you see it come to fruition and you see how good a job you did.”

A lot is riding on the chain’s performance over the festive season. HMV has twice fallen into administration, in 2013 and 2018, and Mr Putman acknowledges that many people didn’t expect his relaunch to last six months.

After all, there have been plenty of casualties in the sector. At the start of the 21st Century, there were a number of other big retailers selling records and CDs, including Virgin, Our Price, Tower and Fopp.

But now, although many local independent shops are still in robust health, HMV is the only national chain standing, with Fopp as its wholly-owned subsidiary.

Poor Christmas sales have capsized many a High Street retailer in recent years, but Mr Putman is pinning his hopes on the chain’s “loyal fan base” and the changes he has been making.

Could a multi-use space be what it takes to transform our struggling high streets?

According to statistics from the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium and Springboard, footfall on NI’s high streets was down by 5.5% last month, making it the worst region in the UK.

Some people in Bangor, County Down, think they may have found the answer.

The seaside town’s main shopping centre, the Flagship Centre, closed its doors earlier this year.

The premises is privately owned and is now in administration.

Louise Little, manager of North Down Community Network, believes a multi-use facility where community, voluntary, health, business, statutory and faith-based sectors can operate under the same roof could regenerate the community and create major footfall.

The director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium said the group is “thinking in a way that a lot of town centres need to”.

“We need to be having these conversations now because this seismic change is already underway,” Aodhán Connolly told BBC News NI.

The ‘death of the high street’ may be overstated, with independent shops booming across the UK, says Which?

Despite a number of well known retailers disappearing from Britain’s High Streets in recent years, new research shows that they have been replaced by smaller businesses that have prospered.

The consumer champion analysed almost 1.5 million Ordnance Survey (OS) business records to compare Britain’s retail and services landscape from 2014 to 2019

The analysis suggests that concerns about the future of the high street may be overstated, and that instead, many high streets are beginning to move towards services that cannot be replicated online, with significant growth in cafés, tattoo parlours, hair and beauty services and function rooms.

Of the 10 sectors that have seen an increase in premises on UK high streets, six are categorised as ‘eating out and services’, with the biggest increase since 2014 seen in banqueting and function rooms (114 per cent).

High street shops had their worst September for eight years thanks to Brexit uncertainty, new figures suggest, and one key sector saw purchases at their lowest since the 2008 recession.

Other factors contributing to an in-store sales fall of 3.1 per cent, compared with a year prior and after an already weak 2.7 per cent drop, included plummeting footfall and closures of big-name chains.

It was the poorest September since 2011, according to BDO’s High Street Sales Tracker.

Weaker discretionary spending resulted in the lifestyle category suffering a 5.4 per cent drop, its worst performance since the height of the recession in November 2008.

Labour will allow councils to seize abandoned shops to give them a new lease of life as cooperatives or community centres, a policy designed to revive struggling high streets.

Jeremy Corbyn is expected to announce the shake-up on a visit to a high street in Bolton on Saturday, calling the sight of boarded-up shops a “symptom of economic decay” which is lowering living standards.

Under the Labour proposals, local authorities could offer properties which had been vacant for 12 months to startups, cooperative businesses and community projects.

The policy was prompted by a study by the Local Data Company which found more than 10% of town centre shops were empty. About 29,000 retail units are estimated to have been left empty for at least a year, according to the study, which found that the high-street vacancy rate rose last year to 11.5% and that 4.8% of vacant space on high streets had been vacant for more than two years. In shopping centres, that number rose to 5.8%.