REPORTS of the death of the high street have been greatly exaggerated.

That is the view of two Bournemouth University academics who make it their business to look at the evidence.

When the Bournemouth branch of Next shut in early January, it raised some of the familiar questions about the future of town centre shops.

It’s easy to find empty shop units in the town – and in Old Christchurch Road, you can see several in a row.

But Jeff Bray, senior lecturer in marketing and retail management at Bournemouth University, does not subscribe to the idea that the high street is dying thanks to online shopping and out-of-town shopping centres.

“I don’t subscribe to it at all. It’s not borne out in the data,” he said.

“In the last six years, retail vacancy rates have improved regionally," said Dr Bray.

"Some of that is accounted for by change of use. We probably have fewer stores selling physical products and more selling services.”

Touring the town centre with the Daily Echo, he said it was easy to see a greater turnover of shops. Leases are shorter than they used to be and retailers are quicker to move in and out.

“We’re seeing higher rewards for good business and harsher penalties for poor businesses,” Dr Bray added.

“A bad business will go out of business quicker then would have been the case in the past.”

The Commercial Road premises that housed Next would have not been the ideal site for the store, he said. Chains tended to prefer units of standard sizes, into which they could easily move centrally planned ranges of stock.

“I suspect that Next had a long lease on the property they occupied. They’ve been there ever since I’ve been in Bournemouth and it during that time the Next business has evolved quite considerably,” he said.

“There are fewer, larger stores so they can get their home wares range in.”

Further along Commercial Road, several fashion stores – including H&M, Zara and River Island – are thriving in a 21st century building on the site of “an old parade of shops that was ripe for tearing down and replacing”.

Some shop units do stand empty for a long time – largely because their landlords are not local, Dr Bray said.

“A lot of retail units will be part of a large portfolio of retail properties. That portfolio will be managed but it will be managed on the aggregate level rather than on the individual unit level, so that one individual shop in Bournemouth sitting vacant for six months could reasonably go unnoticed,” he said.

A landlord might have a policy of maintaining a particular rent in an area, even if there are reasons why an individual site cannot sustain that figure.

There is evidence that different kinds of stores are prospering, with consumers currently spending less but buying better quality, he said.

Many people subscribe to the idea that internet sales will finish off the high street, but Dr Bray says the situation is more complex.

A physical shop can be a showroom for goods that people subsequently buy online – and many customers prefer to order something online and then pick it up rather than wait for the post.

Are customers more inclined to order from a retailer online if that business has a bricks and mortar shop in their area? Work is going on to map the data and find out.

“It may be absolutely the right business thing to do to keep open a store that is not making money because it’s helping support click and collect,” said Dr Bray.

For people outside the town centre, the future of their district high streets can be a concern.

Harry Manley, associate lecturer in geo-information at Bournemouth University, has been using a combination of GPS technology and old-fashioned legwork to track occupancy levels in four districts of Bournemouth since 2012.

In that time, Westbourne has consistently seen more than 94 per cent of its shops occupied – the figure even reached almost 97 per cent at some point. Charminster has varied from 92-94 per cent and Winton from 89-93 per cent.

Meanwhile Boscombe has improved from 83 to 89 per cent occupancy.

“There are some properties that have been vacant ever since the start of the survey that are becoming active – whether the tide’s turned or the landlords have reached a threshold and so will accept any rent rather than no rent,” he said.

Occupancy isn’t everything, but Mr Manley believes the perception that Boscombe is “full of charity shops” is not right. Further research will map the situation further, showing the number of independents vs chains and “prime” vs “sub-prime” businesses.

Mr Manley said: “The suburban high streets are certainly in rude health. People do tend to focus on the town centre and I think that’s because that’s the shop window for tourists. It’s a very different demographic to suburban high streets.”

Meanwhile Dr Bray believes the high street may be changing, but is certainly not dying.

“The nature of the high street has evolved and it probably will at a faster pace than ever before because technology,” he said.

“It wasn’t that many years ago that laws needed to be passed to outlaw the sale of live animals on our high streets, for example.”