Long-form articles

Ask why the high street emptied and you will be told, with a confidence that ought to be suspicious, that people started shopping online. The explanation has the shape of a good one. It names a cause, it arrives at roughly the right date, and it asks nobody to do anything. It is also, at best, a third of the answer.

Let us give the standard account its due. Online retail did take a share, and it took the most profitable share first: books, electronics, the clothing nobody needs to try on. Any shop whose stock could be photographed and posted lost something real, and a number of them lost enough to close. A retailer who tells you otherwise is defending a memory rather than a balance sheet.

The difficulty is that the decline does not follow the internet's map. Two towns forty miles apart, with the same broadband and much the same incomes, can differ by a factor of three in empty shopfronts. What separates them is not how their residents shop but what their landlords are owed. Where a parade of shops has passed to an investment fund, the rent is set by what the property has to be worth on the books rather than by what a butcher can pay; and a unit standing empty at a high notional rent can be worth more to the fund than the same unit let cheaply to a tenant who would have stayed twenty years.

None of this makes the online explanation false. It makes it comfortable. It points at a change nobody chose and asks for sympathy rather than a decision. The competing account points at leases, valuations and a tax levied on floor space, all of which were written by people who are still alive and can be telephoned. That may be why it takes longer to reach print.