What will our high streets look like after the pandemic – and where are the opportunities for retailers?

A drop in demand for stores selling goods will free up space for high-skill services, coffee shops and homes, writes Hamish McRae

High streets that were doing well will continue to do well (Reuters)

The high streets have reopened at last. But it has been a strange and uneven couple of days for the UK’s retailers, pubs, coffee bars and hair salons. It is not simply that the new normal is not yet the old normal – though it is certainly that – for a chilly drink in a pub garden is rather different from one in a warm, crowded bar. It is also the first glimpse of how the new normal will never be the old normal. Some businesses will never reopen – notably some high-street chains, but also some restaurants and other service businesses.

Debenhams is having its huge closing-down sale, with its remaining 97 stores expected to be shut by the end of May. John Lewis is closing many of its stores, and trimming space at others. But that’s the headline stuff. We know all this.

What we know only from walking down our local streets is what is happening to the hundreds of thousands of small enterprises. We see that new trendy restaurant that seemed to be doing OK before the shutdown is now closed for good. But the cut-price hair place a few doors down has a queue stretching round the corner, desperate for quick trim. That story – what happens to small businesses – is what the future of the high street will be about.