How retail landlords can reinvent ailing shopping centres

Ailing shopping centres should be repurposed, benefiting the economy and investors.

Lakeside village outlet shopping Centre, Doncaster

Amazon will need more distribution centres
(Image credit: Credit: Andy Lovell / Alamy Stock Photo)

It is hard to think of a worse time for Britain's battered retailers. Whole chains are closing down, and even where they remain alive branches are getting pruned. Rents are being forced down with threats of bankruptcy if the chains are not allowed to pay less. Philip Green's Arcadia empire, which includes Topshop, is the latest case in point. With every week that passes, the outlook gets bleaker for anyone who runs a shop, and understandably investors are getting very nervous about the fate of the companies that own all that space. After all, a lot of high streets are already virtually dead, and out-of-town shopping centres are increasingly heading in thesame direction.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.