BOURNEMOUTH and Castlepoint are both set to lose major stores after online retailer Asos bought Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge, putting thousands of people out of work.

Asos announced that it had bought the brands for £265million from administrators for the Arcadia group but was not taking over the shops.

Topshop and Topman share a store in Old Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, while Castlepoint has both brands and Miss Selfridge.

The news is another blow to Bournemouth town centre, which already faces the prospect of an empty Debenhams store after online retailer Boohoo bought the department store name but not the shops.

Jeff Bray, senior lecturer in marketing and retail management at Bournemouth University, said: “These chains are being wound up and as there’s a fire sale of their assets, the brands are being bought for what sounds like a big amount of money to you and me but in the corporate world it’s a small amount of money.

“It recognises that there’s still some traffic to the online businesses and those online businesses can be made more efficient by integrating them with, for example, Asos’s platform.

“The brands do have a loyal customer following and are very well known to the customer so they can use the brands and transfer them to their IT platforms and make things more efficient.”

He said a lot of retail space would have to be converted into homes to revive town centres. “That will bring far more people into our town centres and will create more demand for physical retail and dining in the town centre,” he said.

“I can imagine in the case of the Debenhams site, a reduction in the square footage of retail, introducing residential and possibly some leisure. It will still look a nice shop at the ground floor but it won’t have multiple floors above it of retail space for which there is no demand.”

He said independent retail could have a future in the town centre, especially as landlords would have to cut rents.

“I think we will see rents coming down. That will provide a great opportunity for independent people to set up their own smaller business,” he said.

There was anger yesterday that many Arcadia staff learned on the news or social media that hey would be out of a job. The sale of Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge was announced at 7am, and a tweet from Asos welcomed the brands to its “family”. But the 2,500 staff at branches did not hear from administrator Deloitte until 9am, news agency PA said.