Improving the vitality and viability of the UK High Street by 2020: Identifying priorities and a framework for action

Purpose 
 
 
 
 
The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability. 
 
 
 
 
Design/methodology/approach 
 
 
 
 
Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action. 
 
 
 
 
Findings 
 
 
 
 
Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples. 
 
 
 
 
Originality/value 
 
 
 
 
Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

. The enormity and complexity of the problem has made it difficult for high street stakeholders to respond effectively. Therefore, this paper argues, it is necessary for academic scholarship to not only develop theory but also to demonstrate how theoretical concepts can be used to better inform practice. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to make an academic contribution that is useful to practitioners and policymakers trying to effect positive change. To meet this need, the ESRC-funded High Street 2020 UK project set out to take existing academic knowledge relating to retail centre change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability. Ten partner locations 1 were selected to work with a team of academics from five universities 2 . Full details of the methodology employed can be found in another paper in this special issue HSUK2020: A model of engaged scholarship (Ntounis, Parker, Quin and Millington, 2017) but, in summary the project was carried out in three stages. First, through a systematic review of the literature and a more ͚ engaged model of scholarship, the project identified 201 factors that influence the performance of the UK high street. Second, from this longlist of 201 factors a combination of experts and the consensus-building Delphi technique distilled the top 25 priorities for action that local stakeholders should focus on. Finally, given the disparate nature of the evidence base, a framework for high street regeneration (repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring) was built by the research team and applied in the partner towns, to give a more coherent and strategic steer for action in the medium to longer term. The paper ends with a brief summary of some of the impact the project has had so far and our overall reflections on the experience.

A brief history of retail centre research
Despite the claims that high streets and towns centres have undergone dramatic changes recently (Wrigley and Lambiri, 2014), dramatic changes have been a constantly recurruing theme in research into retail centres. In the 1920s and 30s early research relevant to retail centres came from economists studying agglomeration (Hotelling, 1929;Reilly, 1931) in response to increased urbanisation or geographers studying consumers and travel (Christaller, 1933), as a result of rising car ownership. The principle here being that there are benefits to both the consumer and retailer of co-location. For the consumer, collections of shops are associated with a reduction of effort (Hotelling, 1929) as people can just visit one location, rather than have to travel to many. Colocation of similar stores also allows the consumer to comparison shop (Harris & Shonkwiler 1997) and reduce uncertainties (McLafferty and Ghosh, 1986). For the retailer, agglomerations offer supply-side type benefits, though, for example, decreasing labour and other input costs (Marshall, 1890) or by the sharing of facilities and infrastructure such as car-parking (Teller and Reutterer, 2008) or transport modes (Brockman, 2008). As The Law of Retail Gravitation (Reilly, 1931) states, the bigger the centre, the more attractive it is and the more successful it will be in attracting customers from a specific catchment area (Carruthers, 1967;Dennis et al., 2002;Reilly, 1931;Teller and Schnedlitz, 2012). The study of retail centre attractiveness has since been extended to include  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59  non-traditional centres, such as out-of-town retail parks. For example, Eppli & Shilling (1996) found that, in keeping with findings from traditional retail agglomerations, larger shopping centres attract more consumers than smaller shopping centres.
The spatial/economic models of the 1920s and 1930s that dominated retail centre research gradually began to be augmented by more information about groups of consumers. As the 1930s unfolded, initial attempts to understand footfall in a more sophisticated fashion began. Meserole (1935) took into account qualitative variability in pedestrian traffic (such as level of affluence, time of day, proportion of children). The relationships between geographical and catchment areas were further investigated in order to assist retail managers in the selection of appropriate retailing mixes and strategies based on the geography, demand, and heterogeneity of these trade areas (Rosenbloom, 1976). Segmentation and targeting are still seen as crucial when developing marketing and communications activities for retail centres wanting to improve their performance (Teller et al., 2008;Warnaby et al., 2005;Westbrook and Black, 1985).
During the 1940s, the need to identify trade drivers for store location and developments became increasingly important and quantitative methods of city classifications, based on the activity of greatest importance for each city/town (manufacturing cities, retail centres, diversified cities, wholesale centres, university towns, etc.) and relating it to the kind of business, were proposed (Harris, 1943). These classifications progressed into hierarchical classifications of shopping centers and retail outlets based on number of stores and net attraction of the centers' locations (Carruthers, 1957;Carruthers, 1967), physical characteristics of retail locations (Brown, 1991), number of multiple, comparison goods retailers (Reynolds and Schiller, 1992), and on types of goods sold and types of shopping trips (Guy, 1998b), amongst others. These classifications can benefit centre development by understanding consumer demand, forecasting future trends and developing appropriate retail mixes, store designs and local marketing strategies (Hardill et al., 2012).
Also during the 1940s, the rise of chain stores continued rapidly at the expense of independents. Better merchandising, marketing, lower pricing and ability to operate on a lower profit margin, as well as advanced location selection, training, productivity, distribution and public relations with consumers (Beattie, 1943;Beckley, 1949;Jones, 1948;Phillips, 1941) are some of the factors that still drive chain store expansion into the current Century (Karamychev and van Reeven, 2009). In contrast, the negative impact that large-scale retailing can pose to a local economy began to be identified (Phillips, 1941). Restrictions and the first signs of local resistance started to emerge in favour of local merchants with the creation of anti-chain store movements and the rise of the 'localist' ideology (Schragger, 2005). Local resistance is still in evidence in some town centres (Hallsworth and Worthington, 2000) in an attempt to support local businesses as well as long-term town prosperity (Pryor and Grossbart, 2005). However, the overall impact of chain stores on local businesses is not clear as town centers can react differently (both positively or negatively) to these forces of change (Henderson, 2011;Wrigley et al., 2009).
The 1950s saw the introduction of the enclosed, climate-controlled mall (Jackson, 1996) and the scientific study of this new channel in the literature, firstly with investigating locational processes used in selecting shopping centers sites (Kelley 1956). Subsequently, with the spread of the mall during the 1960s, researchers investigated factors such as mall strategies and shopping goods (Dommermuth and Cundiff, 1967), shoppers' movements outside their local retail areas (Herrmann and Beik, 1968), the influence of drive time in shopping center preference (Brunner & Mason 1968) and retail center patronage (Moore & Mason 1969).
In the 1970s, retail decentralization was also starting to occur in the UK and Europe; part of the retail revolution that changed retail geographies of cities mainly due to technological, organizational and  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59  60   r  n  a  l  o  f  P  l  a  c  e  M  a  n  a  g  e  m  e  n  t  a  n  d  D  e  v  e  l  o  p  m  e  n marketing changes, as well as a loosening of planning constraints (Bromley and Thomas, 1993;Collis et al., 2000) and other forms of retail deregulation, such as the outlawing of retail price maintenance. In an increasing competitive retail environment, with an growing array of stores and channels, retail researchers responded by investigating non-retail related consumer motivations to shop at these centers including physical facilities and clientele (Hansen and Deutscher, 1977), cleanliness, presence/quality of bars, restaurants, leisure/sport facilities (Gentry & Burns 1977;Shaw 1970;Moore & Lochhead 1997) and availability of child-minding centers/baby parks (MacLaurin, 1974). While non-retail related factors were increasingly hypothesized to influence store/center choice, according to Teller & Reutterer 2008 (p. 134) retail remained a key driver of center success "(f)ood and entertainment doesn't drive shoppers' evaluations of satisfaction with retail centers/streets. Shops do." Nevertheless, parking availability and quality, convenience and functionality are still important attributes for car-borne shoppers and partially justify their preference for out-of-town shopping centres rather than town centres (Reimers, 2013).
With more out-of-town development UK researchers (such as Clarke, Hallsworth, & Jackson, 2004;Guy, 1998a;Whysall, 1995) assessed its impact on traditional centres, mirroring previous research in the US where the 'move-to-the-suburbs' trend had hit major downtowns hard (Pratt & Pratt 1960). However, it is not just out-of-town developments that have impacted upon the UK High Street. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, UK, urban centres were developed to incorporate covered malls and multi-level shopping (Jones & Orr 1999). The widespread adoption of a USA out of-town format in UK many towns has been heavily criticised. "Large scale retail experience has been mistakenly applied to smaller town centres, which have totally different problems and needs" (Hobday 1982;page 14).
During the 1980s, important changes such as the rise of female employment, increasing car ownership, and suburbanisation of population led to an increasing length of major grocery shopping trips (Guy, 1985). Researchers also started to examine more thoroughly, experiential and behavioural perspectives of consumer behaviour (Gabbott and Hogg, 1994), such as unplanned impulse/compulsive buying (Weinberg & Gottwald, 1982;O'Guinn & Faber, 1989) or browsing behaviour in retail establishments (Bloch and Richins, 1983). These studies highlighted the importance of shopping centre/mall design and the role of the built environment in streets/malls in facilitating consumption (Gottdiener, 1986). Marketing innovations such as instant credit, credit cards, cash machines, and 24-hour retailing (Rook, 1987) also contributed to the rise of impulse buying and further increased consumers' demand for convenience, which in turn fuelled the development of more out-of-town malls, supermarkets and retail parks. This eventually triggered government action against edge-and out-of-town retail development (Reynolds and Schiller, 1992).
As well as planning policy interventions to encourage development in the 'town centre first' came the town centre management movement (Jones, 1990). Originally financed by major retailers who saw themselves as long-term high street channel members (such as Boots and Sainsbury's) the 'philosophy' of managing and marketing the high street came directly from innovations in shopping centre management (Martin, 1982;Morris, 1988) and the improvement of tenant/manger relations (Prendergast et al., 1987). The premise being cleaner and safer centres, with retailers working in partnership (Williams, 1995) would attract more visitors (Jones, 1990). Retail-led regeneration continued to be the major driver of town and city centre development in the 1990s (Findlay and Sparks, 2010). With researchers beginning to investigate stakeholder power (Pal and Sanders, 1997) and motivations.
In the new millennium, the growth of the Internet as a shopping channel has prompted an increasing focus on the 'USP' of the high street with researchers identifying reputation (Hart et al., 2013), place marketing (Kavaratzis, 2007), heritage (Whitehead et al., 2006) and urban design (De Nisco and  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59  60   r  n  a  l  o  f  P  l  a  c  e  M  a  n  a  g  e  m  e  n  t  a  n  d  D  e  v  e  l  o  p  m  e  n Warnaby, 2014) as important components. Other authors have looked at the opportunities for local shopping that may come from, for example, an ageing population (De Kervenoael et al., 2006) or an increasing interest from retail into local CSR activities (Oppewal et al., 2006). Alongside this has been more interest in the models of partnership that are adopted to facilitate collaboration (Coca-Stefaniak, Parker, Quin, Rinaldi, & Byrom, 2009) and improve the centre experience such as the adoption of Business Improvement Districts (De Magalhaes and De Magalhães, 2012). However, this is against a back-drop of a society that is becoming increasingly critical of neo-liberalism and distrustful of public-private partnerships (Peel, 2003). Currently, town centre research has taken somewhat of a technical turn and is focussing upon the potential for and integration of digital technologies (Fletcher, Greenhill, Griffiths and McClean, 2016) as well as the use of big data (Kitchin, 2014) and application of 'smart' solutions (Graham and Peleg, 2017).

The research problem
Our brief review of retail centre research demonstrates that high streets and town centres are subject to a staggering number of forces of change. The difficulties localities face in tackling decline is, in part, due to the complexity and diversity of the problem (Peel, 2010). The people who need to manage the resultant changes in spatial requirement must also understand the complexity of forces that influence change (Clarke et al., 1997;Hernandez et al., 1998;Pioch and Byrom, 2004); the multidisciplinary nature of the evidence base (Palmer et al., 2006) and the multitude of stakeholders (Pal and Sanders, 1997) that make up the high street if they are to play a proactive role in shaping the future of it. The problem is that academic and professional knowledge is fragmented and the study of retail change in particular geographic locations is limited (Wang, 2011).
As 'urban change is not consistently underpinned by reliable information' (Wrigley and Lambiri, 2014) the main aim of the High Street UK 2020 project was to channel existing academic knowledge relating to retail centre change directly to decision makers in individual locations. In particular, the project partners wanted to know what factors/trends were having the most impact upon their high streets, and what they could do about these. The approach was informed by the work of Webber, who, in his seminal paper "The Myth of rationality: development planning reconsidered," (Webber, 1983) questions the model of development planning and concludes that comprehensive development planning is blocked on all sides by insufficient knowledge. He observed that there is usually a lack of factual data on extant conditions and little explanatory (causal) theory resulting in limited instrumental knowledge (Slater et al., 2012). Previous research has also identified that many initiatives to support the high street are not nuanced enough to the needs of the locality (Byrom et al., 2000;Hudson-Davies et al., 2002;Parker et al., 2003). Therefore, the project worked directly with ten locations, facilitating the exchange of knowledge through the range of methods outlined below.

Method
To improve high street decision making through exchanging knowledge of relevance and rigour between high street stakeholders and researchers, we applied a model of engaged scholarship. Engaged scholarship is a participative form of research for obtaining the views of key stakeholders to understand a complex problem in its particular context (Van de Ven, 2007). This informed our research methods, as we engaged, communicated and exchanged knowledge and ideas with academics, practitioners, and local people. Not only did this engaged scholarship provide a useful model of high street performance that resonated with the 'on the ground' reality (Rescher, 2003), but it could also be easily interpreted by all high street stakeholders and inform towns' development plans. The aim of the research had already been agreed across the project -to understand what factors/trends impacted upon high streets and what could be done in response to these. Due to the complexity of forces that shape the high street, no one study had ever attempted to examine all these concurrently. Therefore, in order to identify the factors, a systematic literature review was undertaken. All the methodological details of the project are contained within a separate paper in this special issue 'HSUK2020: A model of engaged scholarship (Ntounis, Parker, Quin and Millington, 2017). However, in brief, the parameters for the review included any peer-reviewed study, published in English, that investigated a factor and related this to retail centre performance, which, for the purposes of the project, we interpreted as 'vitality and viability' -a common interpretation of retail centre performance (Barata-Salgueoro and Erkip, 2014).
The findings from the systematic literature review were then reviewed by the partner towns, during a full day workshop, with the people present contributing 50 additional factors that they felt, from their practical experience, were missing from our literature review (Parker et al., 2014). This then resulted in a final list of 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of retail centres. Although this list was of interest to the town stakeholders, it could not help them prioritise their actions. What the stakeholders really wanted to know was: Research Question 1: How much impact does each factor have on vitality and viability? Research Question 2: How much influence could the high street (local stakeholders) have over the factor?
A rank order of factors, in terms of a) their impact on vitality and vaibility and b) the influence the location has over the factor was established through the use of the Delphi Technique and a panel of 22 leading retail experts (academics and practitioner). As stated previously, the full methodology is written up as a separate paper in this special issue (see Ntounis, Parker, Quin and Millington, 2017) as the focus of this paper is findings and application. This ranking was used to develop a model of high street action (High Street UK 2020) for the ten locations and the first stage of the project culminated in a series of local workshops in the ten locations bringing together retailers and local actors and agencies to use the model to understand the nature of the retail challenge faced by that location and to agree some short-term priorities for action.
The second stage of the project focused upon building a framework for managing medium to longerterm change (interpreted as regeneration or development), from the range of literatures that contain empirical findings relating to interventions. Leading academic experts, visiting researchers in the project, informed the development of this framework. The research team reviewed and distilled the evidence relating to development interventions and their implications, developing the broad themes of 'repositioning', 'reinventing', 'rebranding' and 'restructuring' (The 4 Rs). National workshops on these themes were led by the academic experts and attended by stakeholders of the ten high streets. After the workshops surgery sessions with the towns and the experts were held to identify the regeneration or development strategy that was most likely to positive impact if it were to be adopted by the town. This was then followed up with more workshops is in the partner locations, and the development and implementation of town specific HSUK2020 plans. After two rounds of the Delphi process, consensus over both the impact upon and influence over rankings was reached for 191 of 201 of the factors. This 95% consensus level was deemed acceptable by the project team, when compared to similar Delphi studies, and the consensus scores were transferred to the model (a full list of factors with their Delphi scores are contained in Appendix 1). Where consensus had not been reached the mean scores for these factors were calculated using respondents' scores from both rounds. Plotting each factor on the two axis (impact and influence) generates the scattergram in Figure 1 with 4 quadrants, that the project team along with partners labelled 'Get on with it!', 'Live with it!', 'Ignore it!' and 'Forget it!'.

Identifying priorities for action
The 'Get on with it!' quadrant represents all the factors that the Delphi respondents identified as ones that could be influenced by local stakeholders. The factors in this quadrant are also the ones that have greater influence on high street vitality and viability. The very crowded nature of the quadrant means many of the factors identified through the systematic literature review and by our HSUK2020 partners are located here. One one hand, this is heartening -as one hopes academics will study those factors of most relevance to High Street change. On the other hand, there are still 99 factors in this area. A number our high street partners (the people that had to put these findings into practice) found this number overwhelming and off-putting. In order to bring the number down to one perceived as more manageable -we went on to identify the 25 priority actions within this quadrant. These were identified through combining factors that grouped into meaningful categories, both statistically and in terms of face validity (see Ntounis, Parker, Quin and Millington, 2017). The Top 25 priorities for high street action are presented in Table  1. Priorities presented IN CAPITALS represent two or more of the original 201 factors. Priorities identified in lower case represent just one factor. The High Street UK2020 towns used this list to audit their performance and identify areas that they could start to work on straight away. Average feedback from the 180 delegates that attended the workshops to the question 'it is helpful to know what factors we can influence locally' was 4.5/5. The overall score for 'how worthwhile was the workshop' was was 4.49/5. The score for how much the workshop would help future town centre decision-making was 4.24/5.

ACTIVITY HOURS
Ensuring the centre is open when the catchment needs it. What are the shopping hours? Is there an evening economy? Do the activity hours of the centre match the needs of the catchment?

APPEARANCE
Improving the quality of the visual appearance and aesthetics. How clean is the centre? What is the quality of the public realm?

RETAILERS
Offering the right type and quantity of retailers. What retailers are represented (this includes retailers of products and services).

VISION&STRATEGY
Having a common vision and some leadership. Do the High Street stakeholders collaborate? Is the vision incorporated in local plans? Is the vision adopted in stakeholders plans?

EXPERIENCE
Considering the quality of the experience. Measuring levels of service quality and visitor satisfaction. What is the overall image or offer of the centre?

MANAGEMENT
Building capacity to get things done. Is there effective management -of the shopping centre(s) and town centre?

MERCHANDISE
Meeting the needs of the catchment. What is the range and quality of goods on offer?

NECESSITIES
Ensuring basic facilities are present and maintained. Is there appropriate car-parking; amenities; general facilities, like places to sit down and toilets etc.?

ANCHORS
The presence of an anchor which drives footfall. This could be retail (like a department store) or could be a busy transport interchange or large employer.

NETWORKS & PARTNERSHIPS WITH COUNCIL
Presence of strong networks and effective formal or informal partnerships. Do stakeholders communicate and trust each other? Can the council facilitate action (not just lead it?)

DIVERSITY
A multi-functional centre. What attractions are there, apart from retail? What is the tenant mix and tenant variety?

WALKING
The 'walkability' of the centre. Are linked trips between areas possible -or are the distances too great? Are there other obstacles that stop people walking?

ENTERTAINMENT AND LEISURE
An entertainment and leisure offer. What is it? Is it attractive to various segments of the catchment?

ATTRACTIVENESS
The 'pulling power' of a centre. Can it attract people from a distance?

PLACE ASSURANCE
Getting the basics right. Does the centre offer a basic level of customer service, is this consistent? Or do some operators, or parts of the offer, let this down?

ACCESSIBLE
Ease of reach. How convenient is the centre to access? Is it accessible by a number of different means, e.g. car, public transport, cycling.

PLACE MARKETING
Communicating the offer. How does the centre market and promote itself? Do enough stakeholders' communicate in a way that builds a coherent message? How well does the centre orientate visitors and encourage flow -with signage and guides etc.

COMPARISON/CONVENIENCE
The amount of comparison shopping opportunities compared to convenience (usually in percentage terms). Is this sustainable?

RECREATIONAL SPACE
The amount and quality of recreational areas and public space/open space. Are there places that are uncommodified? Where people can enjoy spending time without spending money?

BARRIERS TO ENTRY
Refers to obstacles that make it difficult for interested retailers to enter the local market. What is the location doing to make it easier for new businesses to come onto the High Street?

21.CHAIN VS INDEPENDENT
Number of multiples stores and independent stores in the retail mix of a centre/High Street. Is this suitably balanced?

SAFETY/CRIME
A centre KPI measuring perceptions or actual crime including shoplifting. Perceptions of crime are usually higher than actual crime rates. Does the centre monitor these and how does it communicate results to stakeholders?

LIVEABLE
The resident population or potential for residential in the centre. Does the centre offer the services/environment that residents need? Doctors, schools, playgrounds etc.

ADAPTABILITY
The flexibility of the space/property in a centre. Are there inflexible and outdated units that are unlikely to be re-let or re-purposed.

25.STORE DEVELOPMENT
The willingness for retailers/property owners to develop their stores. Are they willing to coordinate/cooperate in updating activities? Or do they act independently (or not at all).

Identifying a framework for regeneration
Utilising the Delphi Technique and engaging experts from a range of disciplines (retail, geography, planning, urban regeneration, public administration, management, marketing etc.) fostered crossdisciplinary knowledge exchange, helping to broaden the 'real-world' understanding of a research problem in context (the changing nature of the high street). A range of other stakeholders were also involved in the identification of the 25 priorities for action (Table 1), for example, retailers, retail property owners, consultants, town centre managers, economic development professionals, Councillors and MPs. The 25 priorities were practically orientated -and, given their ability to be controlled or influenced at a town level, were fairly internally focussed. This posed a barrier to a more strategic attempt to guide regeneration in the towns. One of the fundamental premises that drives regeneration in town centres is the competitive tension between towns and cities (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990;van den Berg and Braun, 1999), which is obviously externally focussed. Likewise, retailing is one of the many factors identified as necessary to a place's attempt to attract capital from elsewhere (Niedomysl and Jonasson, 2012). The next stage of the project entailed taking more of a discipline-led approach to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, that took account of the more meso and macro factors and trends that were not the focus of the 25 priorities for action.
In addition to the core project team, four leading academics representing discipline or sub-discipline areas, were engaged as Visiting Researchers to help develop more of a strategic approach to managing change -which still complemented the 25 priorities for action. Professor Deborah Peel summarised literatures on planning and governance; Dr Jonathan Reynolds provided insight on economic geography and retailing; Dr Mihalis Kavaratzis undertook a literature review on place marketing and branding and John Pal summarised relevant developments in retailing and services marketing. Subsequent discussion between all the academics on the project led to the development of a new framework 'The 4 R's of Regeneration' (Figure 2) and the R's consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies, each being the focus of an expert workshop, the content of which is summarised below. Every one of the 4Rs is important as town centres adapt to change and seek to improve their prognosis. However, support from the High Street UK 2020 project was only funded until March 2015 and therefore the project team, through reviewing all the notes from the town workshops, strategic documents and in partnership with the local project stakeholders, identified the strategy area (or R) that could add most value to the existing place management activity, in each of the ten towns. In Market Rasen and Morley this was repositioning. For Ballymena and Barnsley it was reinventing. For Alsager, Altrincham and Holmfirth it was rebranding. Finally, In Congleton, St George Bristol and Wrexham it was restructuring. The 4R's are explored in much more detail within this special issue, as each one has an article dedicated to it.  Repositioning is a strategy focused on identifying a purpose or vision through the effective gathering and analysis of relevant data. Rapid economic, political, and social changes are most likely to lead places to repositioning strategies that will allow them to identify potential competitive advantages (Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2008) or counteract decline (Smith, 2004). Therefore, the focus of the expert workshop was on understanding the forces of change and the value of unique responses that reposition individual high streets, build on distinct capabilities (such as local identity) but are accommodative of future trends (such as an ageing population or the growth of m-commerce). Repositioning could, therefore, lead to town centres that are more resilient (Wrigley and Dolega, 2011). The expert workshop drew heavily from theory found in economic geography and principles of market research. An effective analysis of customer needs and the local economy can help high streets to recognise the failures of previous strategies, identify new ways of expanding their economic activities and find help them find opportunities for improving existing retail stores (Kures and Ryan, 2012).
A sustainable or resilient high street is one that adapts to the changing needs and expectations of customers and can identify useful metrics related to local catchment and demographic change (Wood and Reynolds, 2012). Obtaining up-to-date and relevant data enables towns to position themselves relevant to their catchment, to other towns and to trends, such as the increase in internet shopping and the concentration of comparison retail in the major centres. However, the problem for the HSUK2020 project towns focussing upon repositioning was that the current information or data they had or, more often than not, the information or data that was collected on their behalf, was not useful for strategic repositioning. There was very little focus upon the type of information that would enable them to anticipate and adapt to change, like footfall data, for example. These metrics are important to explain the preference of the users for specific shopping streets (Ercoskun and Ozuduru, 2014) and support the development of initiatives aimed at changing the nature of, or reinventing, the high street (Carmona, 2015).
Reinventing is a strategy that refers to taking action. It is the ability of retail locations to adapt and innovate in unfavourable and uncertain contexts, e.g. the declining high street. The expert workshop drew heavily from retailing and marketing literature -as any new developments should be guided by the marketing principle of meeting the needs/wants of identified target audiences (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990). Likewise, retailing is an important element of the urban place product and "reinventing" this sector along with improvements to complimentary elements of place can contribute to a better understanding of the formation of the "holistic" place product (Warnaby et al., 2005). Retail stores have used different reinventing strategies such as extending opening hours, segmenting store offer to new market niches or reducing the size of the establishment to adapt to the physical conditions of the high street (Pal and Byrom, 2003). These strategies are just as applicable to retail locations, as they are to retail stores. The "reinventing" process of urban places should be built on activities that aim to revitalise a place's identity and image; identity and image can be seen as both static (for communicative purposes in a fixed time) and dynamic, which recognises the uniqueness of each place and the difference in each stakeholder's view about a place (Kalandides, 2011;Kavaratzis and Hatch, 2013). It is the latter view of identities and images that can be used as a driver for reinventing places such as high streets and city centres; a framework built on these premises can unarguably assist the development of rejuvenated, competitive retailing spaces, which will merge innovation and loceal place identity, and will be meaningful for all stakeholders (Coca-Stefaniak et al., 2009).
After the economic collapse of 2008 most of the ten towns in the project were suffering from a lack of innovation because there was little investment, making reinventing difficult. However, by focussing upon more temporary or pop-up change, the reinventing process could begin, even with limited budgets. One of the most important discoveries of the project was the role of flexible and adaptable space in town centres, such as market places, that could be 'reinvented' on different days of the week, or at different types of the day -to provide a more relevant offer, to meet the needs and expectations of the catchment (Millington et al., 2015). Undoubtedly, reinventing relied upon changes on the ground but, on their own, these changes were not enough. People need to know about them and experience them.
Rebranding focused upon on the communication of image and identity as previous studies demonstrate that place consumers may find that the place experience meets or exceeds expectations whilst the image of the place is 'problematic' (Blichfeldt, 2005;Selby, 2004;Stachow and Hart, 2010). For the purpose of this project, rebranding tended to focus upon the application of branding, marketing communications, and public relations techniques in order to deliver an improved place image; a sum of beliefs, ideas, and impressions in the minds of potential consumers of a place (Kotler and Gertner, 2002). Overall, rebranding was considered as a communicative strategy aimed at managing the reputation of high streets and drew most inspiration from the place marketing literature. Even though it is impossible to control all the communication media (e.g. word of mouth and direct experience of the consumer with the high street), high street stakeholders developed promotional activities such as advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, public relations, sponsorships, direct marketing and Internet in order to deliver an attractive image (Warnaby and Yip, 2005). Place branding was also thought of as the 'organising principle' for integrating measures (e.g. events, media relations, residents' participation). Place branding can evoke favourable place images that transfer emotional and self-expression values, as well as utilitarian attributes to individuals (Caldwell and Freire, 2004). Successful place brand management can lead to positive word-of-mouth, and also assist in the transformation of negative images (Hanna and Rowley, 2011;Skinner, 2011). The need to identify how potential stakeholders can co-create the place brand has been the focus of recent developments in place branding (Hatch and Schultz, 2010;Warnaby, 2009) and this aspect was particularly popular amongst the partner towns. High streets, and particularly the retail sector, with the multitude of stakeholders involved in it (users, brokers, fixers) (Pal and Sanders, 1997), can highlight the desires, needs, and views of those stakeholders, which can lead to a better understanding of how place brands are created and evolve (Hanna and Rowley, 2011;Kavaratzis and Hatch, 2013). In particular, the expert workshop explored stakeholder involvement in the creation, development and ownership of place brands (Kavaratzis, 2012).
The towns that embarked upon a strategy of rebranding, in the short-term anyway, made the most progress. Unlike repositioning, which requires a certain amount of evidence and technical expertise in analysis and reinventing, which needs considerable investment (of money and/or time and effort) rebranding was seen as 'quick fix' -a strategy that could unite stakeholders in some focussed effort fairly quickly. Unlike planning, governance or retailing, branding was seen as 'free space' that didn't need huge amounts of expert skills, knowledge or capital. Nevertheless, despite the initial success of a place branding campaign in one of the towns -it did little to solve the problems of division and the entrenched views amongst stakeholder groups. In fact, the brand became associated with the people using it -a tactic employed by the rival group -who wanted to undermine the success of the campaign. This highlights the importance of people and power in places and the need to, sometimes, restructure governance arrangements.
Restructuring, focused upon these people/power issues through examining different forms of management and governance, including formal and informal (Coca-Stefaniak et al., 2009;Peel, 2003); regulatory, functional, and contractual Peel et al., 2009) and structures for communication / knowledge exchange . Consequently, the major point of interest was how the organisations or partnerships that manage high streets can be restructured in order to facilitate all the changes mentioned so far. Restructuring can be interpreted as a management, governance or collaborative strategy focused on understanding the specific role that many parts of the society (market, government and society) play in the configuration of the high street. The complex nature of the high street requires an effective form of management and leadership capable of creating strategic networks and encouraging the involvement of stakeholders and local community in decision-making processes (De Magalhães, 2012;Peel et al., 2009). Practices that entail both commercial and locational benefits are seen as the best way forward (Bennison et al., 2010). Therefore, restructuring was interpreted to mean the cooperation of place stakeholders and creation of strategic networks and public-private relationships that will nurture conditions for the sustainable development of a place (van den Berg and Braun, 1999;Rainisto, 2003).
Restructuring also involves large urban transformation projects such as the physical improvements of the town centre. In the case of retailing, the best spaces created from restructuring can enliven the high street and also shape a better image for the place which can enhance retail operations (Pal and Byrom, 2003). However, the drivers of these regeneration projects can often represent quite narrow interests (De Nisco et al., 2008). Therefore, the active involvement of local stakeholders in Perhaps perceived as the most challenging strategy, the governance structure in one of the towns started to change remarkably quickly. The existing partnership was perceived as not actionorientated enough for some of the retail stakeholders. Therefore, the retailers looked at the 25 priorities for action and identified those they could 'get on with'. Speaking at a Town Centre Forum Meeting, the Chairman Nigel Lewis said: "This arose as a result of the work that Manchester (Metropolitan) University had done. They found there are 25 priorities and how we would tackle those. We had a meeting where the university attended, meeting in the council chambers. We broke up into small groups and started actioning things, such as street clean ups, street festivals and we influenced parking charges. We are recognising that the council have officers and members dealing with issues in the town centre, and we have many volunteers. We don't want to duplicate things and together we want to tackle things that need it and make sure that they are prioritised" (Wrexham.com, 2016).
This action changed the dynamic of the partnership considerably, and the town has now gone on to develop a new governance structure to manage town center activity and development (see below).
As a result of applying the framework in the ten locations it became apparent that there was some relationship between the number of stakeholders that needed to be engaged, the amount of resource that was needed to be invested and the likely success of the approach adopted. Repositioning and reinventing appeared to need less stakeholder involvement than rebranding and restructuring. On the other hand, reinventing and restructuring needed significant more resources (money for reinventing and time for restructuring) than repositioning and rebranding. This finding has been introduced into the 4R's framework in Figure 3.

Impact
Both the 25 priorities, in the short-term, and the 4R's, in the medium term have enabled a multitude of stakeholders in towns to get involved in making their high streets more vital and more viable. Over 180 people attended workshops in their local town centre, to contribute to the High Street UK 2020 projects. Fom now on, any other high street or town centre can use the list of 25 priority actions as a health-check or to focus activity and resources on interventions that will have the most impact on vitality and viability. The findings from the High Street UK 2020 project have been very popular, and the team have been invited to more than 25 conferences and events worldwide to speak to a collective audience of over 5000 people.
The 'good news' that has been generated from this project is also worth mentioning. Many local papers and radio stations tend to focus on 'doom and gloom' stories about the High Street. However the combination of the range of stakeholders involved, the kudos of quality research and the workshops held in towns made for interesting local news stories. The local media in each of the ten towns covered the High Street UK 2020 project at least once. In total the project resulted in 80 news articles, in local papers, on local radio and on websites, such as BBC Wales. Whilst getting favorable media coverage was a welcome outcome, the main purpose of the project was to improve the vitality and viability of specific high streets, through the process of knowledge exchange. Whilst the other articles in the special issue cover this process in more detail, we include a brief round up of  Morley approached repositioning in several ways. They worked closely with a wide range of stakeholders to share and analyse information and data, including the nearby out of town shopping centre. The group also looked in to how to gather missing data, which resulted in a footfall counter being installed in the main street (positioned on the local MPs office as she saw how this would benefit the centre). A better understanding of the town and how it was performing has enabled many new initiatives to be taken. Atrincham focused upon rebranding and the ambition, contained in Altrincham Town Centre Public Realm Strategy was to make Altrincham "'the Modern Market Town' an integral part of people's everyday lives and a place people can be proud of again. Our aim is to change people's perceptions of the town from one which is negative to overriding positive". Unlike other locations where branding straplines remain unattainable pipe-dreams, Altrincham is delivering on the promise of a 'modern market town' as it has, according to the local paper, Altrincham Today (2016) developed a retailer and service mix, firmly anchored around a hugely successful food market, offering the catchment something special as well as benefiting from better access and connectivity, with improved transport links and a £19m overhaul of the Altrincham Interchange.
Finally, relevant to restructuring, a Wrexham Town Centre action plan has since been developed by the Wrexham Town Centre Partnership Steering Group in response to the High Street UK 2020 Study. This Plan has been agreed by the Town Centre Forum and although it includes actions that are delivered by the Council, its intention is as a partnership plan rather than one specifically articulating the Council's Vision for Wrexham Town Centre. It was agreed that a single strategy was required that brings together all the Council's strategies and action plans relating to Wrexham Town Centre, clearly setting out the Council's priorities for making it a vibrant, safe,accessible and prosperous place for people to live, work and visit.

Conclusions and reflections
Our project was timely as it clearly supported the aim of 'ensuring the vitality of town centres' contained within the National Planning Policy Framework 2012, the renewed focus upon town centres found in the regeneration strategies of Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland's proposed PPS5, a variety of current government initiatives designed to promote innovative and multistakeholder approaches to town centre change, namely the High Street Innovation Fund; the Business Improvement District fund; the Portas Pilots and the Town Team Partners. By working directly with ten different locations, the project helped the local agents of change (high street stakeholders in the private, public and third sectors) identify and understand their information requirements and get access to accurate and relevant academic knowledge, to improve the quality of decision making and provide solid academic underpinning to their plans for action.
Identifying 25 generic priorities for action was a very popular approach with the stakeholders. The plethora of existing development plans, public realm strategies, action plans, visions and strategies can confuse people and even alienate them. At best each document appears to standalone -and, at worst, the documents contradict each other. Given the diversity of people that need to collaborate in the collective goal of high street success, much more thought needs to be given to how actions and strategies are communicated. The scattergram and 25 priorities developed within the project could be disseminated clearly and quickly -and we think that is why they were so widely adopted.
In a similar fashion, our 4Rs framework brought a thorough but complicated evidence base to towns in a more coherent fashion, using our academic experts. Of course, given the complex nature of high street change all these strategies overlap. The underpinning theory and principles we used in the project came from a wide range of literatures. However, our high street stakeholders were not interested in engaging in epistemological debates. They looked to us, as academics, to make some sense of this on their behalf, so they could concentrate on putting theory into action. Having a simple framework, where town stakeholders could enter at any point meant they could approach regeneration in a way that accommodated the path they had already started to take, be sensitive to how they had started to conceptualise the problem or reflect the amount of people and resources they had to hand. Did they feel they needed more information (repositioning), did they want to get on with something (reinventing), did they need to communicate more effectively (rebranding) or did they need to work out who was responsible for what (restructuring)? Given how disciplines and subdisciplines 'spread', the theory and pinciples to answer all these questions are not contained neatly in any one literature stream. Therefore the chances of practitioners finding comprehensive answers in academic literature are slim. Where do they start looking? Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make. Not only has the process of enagaging more meaningfully with research users led to the development of new theory (the 4 R's framework) but it has also brought existing theory into practical use, through the 25 priorities. By engaging the stakeholders in the whole project from design all the way through to dissemination there is no doubt the quality of the research questions improved, our data collection and analysis methods benefited and our ability to transfer this knowledge was significantly amplified. We look forward to measuring the impact this project has had on the vitality and viability of the partner locations in 2020.    1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  53  54  55  56  57  58  59  60