Retail sector

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This interdisciplinary volume explores how English commercial, co-operative and charity retailing were shaped by and in turn influenced their social and political environments, from the local and the global, between the late-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.

In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a troubling new kind of space for consumer society: the retail ruin. Drawing on the author’s own fieldnotes and photographs, this book takes a hauntological approach to these ‘new’ ruins in the urban landscape.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, How to save our town centres asks whether the internet has killed our high streets and how the relationship between people and places is changing, how business is done and who benefits, and how the use and ownership of land affects us all.