Covid has finished off the old high street, but we can replace it with something better | Owen Hatherley

Preston and Wrexham show that the collapse of retail in city centres needs solutions beyond shoddy housing conversionsIn 2011, a new kind of shopfront started appearing in towns and cities across the UK. It would bear the name and photograph of something that wasn’t actually there – Virtual Gift Shop, Virtual Fashion, Virtual Sports Shop, to name three I saw in Redcar. What was so depressing about this was the absence of any new ideas, any conception that there was anything else the