The decline of Princes Street and Sauchiehall Street is no isolated Scottish tragedy; it’s a pattern replicated across the UK and beyond. Why? In Part Two Charlie Ellis seeks answers beyond the market.
Structural Explanations for High Street Decline
Andrew Neil’s market-focused prescription [in Part One] is widely contested. Many commentators and academics point to deeper structural forces behind the decline of the high street: the long tail of the 2008 financial crisis, changing consumer habits, and the rise of out-of-town retail parks. These developments shifted retail away from traditional high streets towards, enclosed, car-friendly complexes where convenience and parking trump the historic streetscape.
Personal recollections can illuminate this shift. A recent visit to Edinburgh’s Cameron Toll Shopping Centre, for example, evoked the era when such centres were new and exciting, part of a broader, Thatcher-era transformation of British retail that prioritised concentrated, suburban shopping over dispersed city-centre trade. We could see it as part of a partial ‘Americanisation’ of our shopping and our cities.
This was the era of great expansion, the sense that more and more shopping space was needed. This led to some fairly radical plans, such as that to create large retail spaces beneath Princes Street. These now look like proposals for empty commercial tombs, a reminder that market-driven expansion can produce long-term vulnerabilities as consumer patterns evolve. Now, Cameron Toll is to be redeveloped. The proposals involve creating “new homes and better shops” as modern malls “face a new and challenging landscape.”
Recent industry data underline these structural pressures. UK retail footfall fell by about 2.2% year-on-year in 2024, with high streets down roughly 2.7% in December (Retail Insight Network, 2024). ONS estimates also record a 0.3% fall in retail sales volumes in December 2024, reflecting softer consumer spending in key periods (Office for National Statistics, 2024). These figures help explain why large, centrally located retail spaces, once assumed to be safe bets, now risk becoming underused as consumer behaviour evolves.
The struggles faced by Waverley Market in its various guises would be an example of this. It make me wonder if, instead of demolition in the 1980s, a full restoration of the original market would have provided what Edinburgh now needs: something comparable to Covent Garden in London or Oxford’s covered market, something of substantial scale but consistent with Edinburgh’s historic character. But to have done so would have required a lot of imagination.
You think you’ve got problems?
The revival of these two iconic streets was the focus of a well-attended event hosted by the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust at Riddle’s Court, in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, in December. Andrew Neil’s comments on Sauchiehall Street were referenced regularly, with speakers aware that his views reflected a widely shared public narrative. Taken together, the speakers, whilst accepting that there was much to do, offered an implicit critique of Neil.
Terry Levinthal, head of Edinburgh World Heritage, and Niall Murphy of Glasgow City Heritage Trust offered measured analyses that differed from the declinist rhetoric common online. Levinthal argued that the underlying cause of recent changes was actually “a form of market success”: economic forces had reshaped demand and ownership patterns. He called for a renewed emphasis on architecture and design, led by empowered public authorities, but warned that those authorities had been hollowed out and lacked the resources to act effectively.
Levinthal’s message was a direct rejoinder to Neil’s: we cannot rely on the market alone, especially when many building owners are not based in Scotland. Determined public intervention is essential, because the commercial sector does not make good policymakers. From this perspective, the remedy is not to retreat from public responsibility, but to rebuild strategic, well-resourced local institutions capable of shaping outcomes.
Niall Murphy began his discussion of Sauchiehall Street by quipping to Levinthal, ‘you think you’ve got problems!’ He focused on the 1.6-kilometre retail stretch, detailing its history as both a commercial street and a hub for theatres, such as the Empire Theatre, making it ‘very much embedded in the social history of Glasgow.’ Murphy described the significant impact of lost buildings, including the Empire Theatre itself. The Comprehensive Development Plan of 1960 also resulted in widespread demolition and a substantial decline in central Glasgow’s population density.
The construction of the M8 motorway further ‘severed’ parts of the city. Out-of-town shopping centres and the shift to working from home during the pandemic have reduced footfall. The major fires at the Victoria Nightclub in 2018, and at the Glasgow School of Art and the adjoining ABC, have had a huge physical and psychological impact, creating a ‘huge blight on the street’ and ‘underscoring the perception of decline’. The recent sudden closure of the Centre for Contemporary Arts has only added to this.
O2ABC boarded up after the fire, making way for student accommodation? With a bit of imagination …
Murphy highlighted the problem of poor-quality shop-front designs that ‘brought down the tone.’ Large department stores, such as the BHS building, empty since 2016, pose major challenges, often proving difficult to repurpose due to extensive internal alterations. He felt there were also several ‘irredeemable’ buildings, citing the Sauchiehall Centre (formerly housing House of Fraser) as the prime example. In contrast, he pointed to fine modern buildings such as the former C&A store, asking rhetorically, ‘how can they be vacant?’ More broadly, Murphy called for compulsory purchase of such buildings, and their repurposing.
Arguing for stronger public intervention, however, means confronting highly politicised debates about how city centres should be re-engineered. Measures to encourage active travel (pedestrianisation, cycle lanes, reduced car access) often provoke fierce backlash. These disputes are frequently framed in populist terms, with motorists cast as the ‘mainstream majority’ and cyclists portrayed as the ‘graduate class’ or ‘lanyard class’ of metropolitan liberals. That binary has fuelled a particularly toxic online discourse, complicating efforts to build consensus around design-led regeneration.
Local Failures or Deeper Forces?
The decline of Princes Street and Sauchiehall Street is no isolated Scottish trend; it’s a pattern replicated across the UK and beyond. This raises a fundamental question: is this a case of uniform incompetence amongst local councils, or are more profound economic and social forces at work?
Online, deeper forces are mentioned but usually this has a strongly conspiratorial tone. In short, the decline of high streets is part of a wider ‘great reset’ or a ‘managed decline’ to strengthen the grip of ‘globalist elites’. While those promoting such narratives proffer themselves as independent thinkers, their discourse is marked by repetitiveness, the same tropes appearing again and again. A prominent promoter of conspiracist perspectives has been James Melville. He recently echoed Andrew Neil’ comments on Sauchiehall Street
Melville describes being shocked by what he saw during a visit to Dundee, saying he was “struggling to process what I saw in Dundee today. It was horrendous.” He portrays the city as suffering from deep decline, calling it “a once glorious city… now full of decay.” He lists boarded‑up shops, dirty streets, weed‑covered pavements, widespread homelessness and litter, concluding that “the city centre looked completely hollowed out.” Melville argues that Dundee is not an isolated case, insisting that “it’s happening all over the UK.” He places responsibility squarely on local authorities, declaring “shame on the local councils who are clearly not bothering to use council tax money on the basic maintenance of civic pride.” He also criticises what he sees as a broader failure to create conditions for business and enterprise to thrive.
Desperate Dan strides along Dundee High Street, sculptors Tony and Susie Morrow
Again, that question raises its head: is it really true that local authorities are to blame? As Melville noted, “it’s happening all over the UK,” but the conclusion he drew from this seems to be that there is a general paucity of good local governance across Scotland and across the UK. What about beyond the UK’s shores?
Parallels can be drawn with cities like Athens, where urban decay followed a sharp economic contraction, suggesting that these causes are often structural rather than merely political. Whilst local governance undeniably matters, it functions within a volatile environment of market shifts, fiscal constraints, and evolving lifestyles. From this perspective, Neil & Melville’s focus on local authority intervention commits the classic error of confusing correlation with causation. In reality, local councils are often attempting to hold back tides far more powerful than their administrative reach allows.
Ultimately, the competing narratives surrounding Scotland’s high streets reflect a deeper ideological divide. By placing Andrew Neil’s market-orientated critiques alongside the structural perspectives of heritage and planning experts, we see an intricate interplay of economic change and cultural storytelling. Neil’s rhetoric channels a firm belief in private enterprise and a deep-seated scepticism of the state.
Conversely, the perspectives shared at Riddle’s Court emphasise the market’s limitations, highlighting a desperate need for public stewardship and well-resourced institutions. Any serious attempt to revive these urban arteries must move beyond finger-pointing and grapple with both immediate policy shortcomings and the long-term structural transformations that have fundamentally reshaped retail, mobility, and the very nature of urban life.
In Part One Charlie Ellis examines Andrew Neil’s claims of local government failure and incompetence, and moves on to a more complicated landscape
Credits
Feature image, A listed derelict Lion Chambers on Glasgow’s Hope Street
Old Waverley Photochrom Print Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Cameron Toll, Fangz CC 4.0 Wikimedia Commons
Dundee and Glasgow pictures, Fay Young
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