When I was young the nearest town (my parents lived outside in a village) had a bustling high street and everything was in the town centre. You could go there a

When I was young the nearest town (my parents lived outside in a village) had a bustling high street and everything was in the town centre. You could go there and spend hours shopping in different places without issue. There were supermarkets, department stores (yes multiple), bakeries, butchers, toy stores, etc. This is a town with a population of 20,000, but the wider area it covers is easily 3-5x that. It was a small town though, so if you wanted something else you needed to go to the city (1.5 hours drive away). 20 years ago Tesco opened a new store outside the town centre, it's still quite small compared to some stores though, with very little non-food. A McDonalds opened outside the town on a main road, which was the final nail in the coffin for Wimpy. Other than that, not much has really changed. The town has expanded a lot, with lots of new housing being built (the population has gone up by around 25%) but no new retail parks have appeared. Today the town center is pretty much dead though. This started maybe a decade ago, a Starbucks opened and within a couple of years it shutdown. A few years later banks started closing or relocating to smaller units. This past year even charity shops closed down or relocated to industrial units outside the town centre. Business owners say the problem is the rent is too high. I'm not sure it's just that, but yeah, in the UK the high street seems dead today...