Death of the Town Centre

For me, making the trip to the 'town centre/high street' in a typical medium sized Northern town has held absolutely no appeal this century.

Gone are the shops of yesteryear which I remember from the 70/80s. Instead, replaced by charity/betting/fastfood/'spoons' variants and 'to-let' signs i.e. boarded up shops fronts.

Travel to the Town Centre by car and you are stuck in traffic or long searches for parking. Then you still have to pay for the exhorbitant temporary rent of a parking bay. By bike , even locked up with multiple locks and a GPS tracker, you have a maximum of a 30 minute window before some miscreant has eyes on it to have it away. Public transport is uninviting, inconvenient and expensive.

The life has been allowed to seep away from the Town Centre over the years and there is no coming back. 

Hands up, I use eBay and the rest of them and even without the Covid , milling about in crowds had no appeal. Now with Covid , every unmasked person is a potential threat to my well being, my decision is to just 'stay away' - permanently.

There is nothing the Council or the Government can do about that, apart from raise the taxes year on year and talk about town regeneration.

Town Centre has become home to the homeless and the feckless.