Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.
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Few things unite Britons in these troubled times like the idea of a thriving high street – which might explain why politician after politician, and even government after government, relentlessly promises that they plan to “save” them.
Almost no one can claim to have been as passionately committed to that cause as Mary Portas, the retail branding expert – credited with bringing Harvey Nichols into the modern era – who became TV’s “Queen of Shops”.
First, she regenerated struggling independent shops for reality television. Then, she set her sights on charity shops. Eventually, her ambitions got bigger: she attempted to rejuvenate the high street of Tewkesbury for the BBC, before eventually getting hired by David Cameron to lead a review into the future of the high street.
Ever since, she has campaigned politically and on television to save high streets, or at least regenerate them for the 21st century. The public seems to be on her side – 78 per cent of us say having a high street in our area is at least “fairly important” to us – small businesses are on her side, politicians seem to be on her side. The only question is whether we actually want or need high streets to be “saved”.
The same YouGov survey that revealed 78 per cent of us supposedly value our high streets also revealed that we don’t necessarily value them enough to actually use them: only 28 per cent of respondents said they used their local high street at least once a week, and only 53 per cent of people said they used theirs even once a month.
In 2007, when Mary Portas launched her first “Queen of Shops” series, only 3.4 per cent of UK retail sales happened online. Today, that same figure is 27.5 per cent. Old-school shops like butchers, fishmongers, and grocers had long been losing a fight against the convenience and affordability of supermarkets.
Now, almost every other shop is suddenly in a similar war of attrition against Amazon. On one level, that feels almost comedically good versus evil – plucky British shopkeepers against a deeply unlikable US corporate giant.
But the reality of Amazon’s operations make the picture a little more complicated: the majority of what you buy from the Amazon website isn’t sold by Amazon themselves: it is a marketplace for hundreds of thousands of small UK businesses, even if it makes sure it takes a generous share of the proceeds.
More than that, no one is forcing us to shop online. No one ever did. It is simpler, cheaper, and offers a greater degree of choice. For a while, the tax system was deeply unfair to local shops – who had to pay VAT and business rates, when some of their online competitors paid neither – but online retailers now pay tax too.
The reality is that nothing a government could do is going to make the old-fashioned high street of the 1990s or early 2000s come back. Amazon was bad enough for the high street, but Uber Eats and Deliveroo risk doing to restaurants what online retail did for shops. Yes, some benefit from extra delivery orders, but apps have rapidly expanded to using ghost kitchens out on industrial estates. Maybe soon, there’ll be nothing left on the high street at all.
It might seem unfair to blame Mary Portas for that – possibly because it is. The problem isn’t that she’s to blame for the decline of the old-school high street. It’s that for a time she made us think that it could be saved.
Mary, Queen of Shops suggested to anyone who watched that maybe independent retailers could continue to thrive if they just designed themselves better, modernised, and stocked the right items – suggesting, deliberately or otherwise, that individual decisions might reverse societal changes.
Some small businesses continue to thrive, of course, especially those that mix an in-person shop, often hosting events, with an online delivery business. But by being such a good TV personality, genuinely passionate about what she was doing, and with some actually good ideas, Mary Portas has helped generations of policymakers deny the reality that the very way we think of high streets has to change.
To be fair to Portas, she has said some of this herself: her review for the coalition government suggested cultural events, service businesses and community projects would have to play a bigger role on high streets, even as it tried to suggest tax reforms and similar to save shops.
Given Portas’s public image as a champion of independent retail, she would have struggled to go further, but the reality in 2026 is this – high streets as elder millennials, Gen X and boomers once knew them are a thing of the past. What people need from them in the 21st century are convenience items you want at short notice – food, drinks, vapes – and services that you can’t sell online, like barbers, nail bars, and tanning salons.
These tend to be the shops that actually get used, but also the ones that people get angry about, because they don’t suit our aesthetic ideas about what a “good” high street looks like. The British curse is increasingly insisting that institutions and organisations we do not actually use must be preserved and continue unchanged – whether they are churches, local butchers, or village pubs. We want someone else to fund things, so we can be reassured that they are there.
Accepting the realities of the internet era would make it easier to make the tough choices to try to make 21st century town and city centres nicer: we could clear more space for parks and recreation. We could encourage the kinds of businesses that still work offline. Crucially, we could use more town and city centre space for housing, which might itself regenerate cafes and pubs that have lost out on people driving in from the suburbs.
But doing so means letting go of the aesthetic, aspirational, retail high street from Mary Portas’s most famous TV work. She has fought a magnificent battle – but the war was lost long ago.