Why Britain keeps funding the appearance of renewal.

I have spent the better part of a decade building and operating community food markets and was fortunate enough to receive the then largest single grant the Mayor of London’s Good Growth Fund awarded to a private project for the development of a sustainable food and brewery market. So, when I walk past freshly painted shopfronts with “To Let” signs in the window, I am not theorising from a distance. I have been observing from the inside. The theory is simple. If the only thing the money is designed to change is how a place looks, then how a place looks is the only thing that will change. Everything else, the footfall, the traders, the commercial engine that determines whether anyone actually buys anything there, carries on exactly as it was. The paint dries and the shutters stay down. Then, the funding body publishes a completion report.

Earlier in March this year, the UK government announced £301 million in High Streets Innovation Partnerships, part of a wider £319 million package under the Pride in Place programme.

The language is familiar. ‘Reimagine and revive.’ ‘Transformative plans.’ A ‘summer of activity’ to boost footfall. ‘Pride in Place.’ The published documents describe inputs and activities (new uses, community hubs, green spaces) and desired feelings (pride, confidence, belonging).

What they do not describe, in any published guidance so far, are quantified outcomes. No mandatory occupancy targets. No footfall thresholds. No clawback if the money produces immaculate public realm and no viable traders to occupy it. A third of a billion pounds is about to be deployed into struggling high streets under conditions that measure what gets built, with no published obligation to measure whether it works.

We have run this experiment before.

An Architect-Led Market Revitalisation and a Ghost Town

In 2011, following riots that damaged parts of London, the London Mayor’s Regeneration Fund allocated £2 million to Hackney. The largest share, £1.5 million, went to a fashion hub on Morning Lane. Network Rail added £3.3 million. The developer contributed a further £12.5 million. David Adjaye, one of the most celebrated architects in the country, designed the masterplan. Hackney Walk was billed as a world-class fashion destination that would create 450 retail jobs for local residents. It opened in 2016 in beautifully refurbished railway arches.

By 2019, most of the units were empty. By 2022, the Hackney Gazette found that only four of the 14 units were occupied. The scheme’s own website had stopped working. Its last social media post was months old. MP Meg Hillier expressed shock and criticised the council for failing to monitor whether the development was being used at all. No job creation figures were available from either the council or City Hall. When the Gazette approached the Greater London Authority, it could not say where the money had gone, citing that the funds had been handed to the council years earlier under a previous mayoral administration.

The fabric was perfect. The arches were immaculate. The feedback loop that would have told anyone whether the scheme was commercially viable had never been built. The funding measured what was constructed. Nobody measured what traded.

Centre for Cities’ 2025 report “Checking Out,” drawing on millions of anonymised card transactions, found that the root cause of high street failure is economic, not cosmetic. Vacancy rates in Newport and Bradford run above 18 per cent, more than double London or Cambridge. The report identified three drivers, none of which can be painted over. Low local spending power. Too much retail space per head. Spending leakage to nearby larger centres. Its explicit recommendation was to shift away from attempts to “save the high street” with cosmetic measures. Hackney Walk is the worked example of what happens when that recommendation is ignored.

The question no one is asking

In Manchester, Gorton Market is undergoing regeneration backed by approximately £1.1 million through a Local Growth fund administered by Greater Manchester Combined Authority. The structurally interesting detail is that existing traders have been retained during the works. Trading continuity was treated as a design precondition rather than an afterthought. It is far too early to call this best practice. The money is still being spent, the outcome is unknown, and the same structural risks apply. But it shows that the cosmetic-versus-structural choice is a choice, made differently in different places.

It also opens a question about devolution that is about to become louder. Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” model, which may well shape national economic policy if he takes on a larger role in managing the country, is built on pushing spending authority down to metro mayors, combined authorities, and neighbourhood boards. That instinct is sound in feedback terms. Local decision-makers hold information that Whitehall does not. But distributing spending power without distributing the consequence architecture to match, hardly creates accountability. Instead, it disperses it. The autonomy-versus-accountability tension is already recognised in the policy literature. The question is structural, not partisan, and it applies regardless of who holds the office. When decision rights move but the loop that registers whether the money worked does not move with them, the result is a more locally governed version of the same disconnection.

Britain has spent a generation perfecting the art of making failing places look as though they are about to succeed.

I suggest that the structural correction is not necessarily complicated. It is simply unfamiliar. Funding of this kind changes outcomes only when it is conditioned on the commercial feedback loop that determines whether a place is viable. That means occupancy and trader-survival metrics written into grant conditions. It means gateway reviews tied to footfall and trading data, not completion milestones. It means clawback provisions that make the funding body and the local authority jointly accountable for outcomes, not just for delivery. And it means an honest assessment, before the first pound is spent, of whether the local economy can generate enough demand to sustain whatever gets built. No new legislation is required. What is needed, is the willingness to measure consequence instead of appearance.

The dynamic this case exposes is examined in detail in my book, The Re-Alignment Era.

The next £301 million will be spent. Some of it will produce places that work. Some of it will produce beautifully refurbished units with “To Let” signs in the window. The difference will come down to a single question that nobody in the approval chain seems willing to ask before the paint dries. Is there a customer on the other side of the door?