IT was the year that saw the disappearance from the high street of some of shopping’s biggest names – including Debenhams, Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and Burton.

A list of closures like that would once have seemed like the apocalypse for the retail industry.

But while there is no sugar-coating the loss of thousands of jobs, a reinvention of the high street might be under way.

When speaking to retailers and observers, the same insight keeps cropping up: The pandemic has accelerated changes that were already happening.

A series of Covid lockdowns blighted all retailers. But those lockdowns were particularly hard for some of the big chains that were already dealing with high rent and rates, historic debts and ever-increasing competition from online shopping.

The Arcadia Group employed 13,000 people and had 444 UK stores when it went into administration towards in December 2020.

Its brand names were snapped up by online rivals. Boohoo bought Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burton for £25.2million, while Asos paid £265m for Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge. Evans went to City Chic for £23m. But those buyers only wanted the names and the stock – not the shops.

The same was true for the 244-year-old Debenhams chain, whose name and stock were sold to Boohoo for £55m without its 118 stores and most of the 12,000 jobs.

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Town centres everywhere are looking to a future without some of their biggest names.

Paul Kinvig (above), chief operating officer of Bournemouth Town Centre Business Improvement District (BID), said of 2021: “As Charles Dickens put it, it was the best of times it was the worst of times.

“Covid has accelerated what was already going on in change in in town centres, probably by 10 years – with fundamental shifts in retailing and customer shopping behaviours, the move towards ‘experience’ and town centres becoming places you come to have something to eat, to see a show, to look at an exhibition, and to go and shop.”

Bournemouth was one of the first to see a new use of its Debenhams store.

The huge shop in the town centre, purpose-built in 1915, was taken on by Verve Properties and reverted to its original, pre-Debenhams name, Bobby & Co.

Inside are concessions including a pop-up market, independent retailers, arts and craft demonstrations, an ice cream parlour, food and drink and a gallery.

Mr Kinvig said: “Bobby’s is a brilliant example of innovation and different thinking that we’re going to need in the town centre.”

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Dr Jeff Bray, associate professor of consumer behaviour at Bournemouth University, agrees that the Bobby & Co reinvention is fascinating. “If you look at Bobby’s, the size hasn’t changed but it's being let as smaller areas,” he said.

“By changing what’s going on and creating something new, you’re creating more of an experience and you’re providing great opportunities for independents to open and see what works. That kind of experiment will enable us to discover what does work and what doesn’t work so well.”

Mr Kinvig said town centres will increasingly be the places where people come to do a combination of things – such as have a meal, see a show and do some shopping. And while times have been tough, Bournemouth has been seeing plenty of visitors.

“In the summer, Bournemouth became the place to go for a staycation, and then in terms of footfall that first weekend of the Christmas Tree Wonderland we were six per cent up on 2019,” he said.

Bournemouth and Poole both found themselves in the New York Times this summer, in a piece examining the future of the UK high street.

Much of the story was devoted to Kingland, the parade of shops outside the Dolphin Centre which has been turned over to new, independent businesses. The tenants – including a surfboard shop, a gallery, a fishmonger, and a restored furniture shop – will not pay rent and rates for their first two years.

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“We’ve had something like 150 different articles written on Kingland,” said Greg Westover, fund head of retail and leisure at landlords LGIM Real Assets, part of Legal & General.

“The opportunities it’s given to entrepreneurs that have come to us that have a dream of opening a shop but didn’t have the capacity to open a shop financially have just been phenomenal,” he said.

“It’s given these people the ability to fulfil a dream as we’ve seen with people like Wild Roots [a houseplants and interiors shop] and the incredible turnaround story behind Restored Retro furniture shop.”

For years, critics complained that town centres only wanted to attract the big name retailers and squeeze out any individuality.

“Unfortunately, everybody was going down one route, which was the multiple retailer route, driven financially,” said Mr Westover.

“At the end of the day the landlords are financially driven but we’ve got a lot of points where we think we can serve a social purpose.”

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Tony Brown was in charge of the old Beales chain of department stores when it was brought down by high costs and debts just before the pandemic.

Now, he leads a reinvented Beales as chief executive of New Start 2020, with stores in Poole, Peterborough and Southport.

“It’s been a difficult and stressful year for every retailer,” he said.

“We’ve learned a load of lessons as far as how we’ve diversified, how we have to look at online. Our experiment in Peterborough and Southport is going very well and particularly in Southport, where we’ve had 25 local businesses working at the store – everything from tray makers to chocolatiers to gin makers and so on.

“We’ve crammed a decade’s worth of change into two years,” he added.

“We’ve learned in retail that the old ways of working are no longer viable.”

The Poole store now mixes local brands with famous names. And it has pioneered something new for retail by letting out its top floor to the NHS, which is using it to help tackle waiting lists, as well as to dispense Covid vaccines.

But some of the traditional challenges remain. The store attracts a £279,000-a-year business rates bill – a problem which online retailers don’t have. And supply chain problems, rents and increases in the national minimum wage will all add to costs next year.

For all those challenges, Jeff Bray at Bournemouth University is upbeat about town centres. “In some ways I think the events of 2021 have accelerated trends that were already there,” he said.

“For some people, the pandemic has nudged them to try online shopping where they were reluctant before, especially with grocery.

“However, on the other side I still maintain that the high street has a bright future. Increasingly, as people are working from home they’re looking to go out and do leisure activities out of the home and so a vibrant high street that provides a good experience, allows you go out and get some lunch with some retail, will really thrive and do well in a post-pandemic Britain – if post-pandemic is something that we can ever say.”

Mr Kinvig added: “I’m constantly amazed at the resilience ingenuity and innovation of people who operate businesses in the town centre. The way they’ve been hit and get back up, the way they flex, the way they innovate, the way they work in partnership and the way they just keep on is remarkable.”