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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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper aims to examine the role of “restructuring” in confronting the challenges facing contemporary high streets in the devolved UK. It complements three articles concerned with repositioning, reinventing and rebranding and illustrates the multi-faceted approaches involved in addressing retail change and town centre transformations. This paper emphasises the role of planning and governance in effecting change.

Informed by a literature review, action research involved inter-related interventions in selected locations, and associated workshops with engaged practitioners and community actors.

The findings highlight that the “resilience” of contemporary town centres demands resisting efforts to return to the status quo and necessitate forms of adaptive management. Understanding high street degeneration and the limitations of a retail-only led policy focus as a “wicked issue” further demands socially constructing town centres as an ecosystem requiring a holistic response. New forms of joint-working involve selecting appropriate models, attending to relational aspects and defined roles and responsibilities. Land use planning, including masterplanning and creating evidenced policy options, provides an important democratic space for legitimising action, offering leadership and extending participation to new change agents.

Restructuring of governance is an essential prerequisite in effecting change.

The originality of this study lies in the application of the restructuring element of the 4 Rs Framework which enables a focus on the governance dimensions of town centre and high street regeneration. The findings are enhanced through the experiential evidence which stresses both the importance of place-based diversification and value of prioritising holistic and joint actions developed through participatory visioning exercises.

The purpose of the paper is to present and critically discuss the findings of the ESRC-funded HS2020 project. The aim is to discuss the retail-led change that has happened to the High Streets that participated to the project that, in some cases, is revolutionary and is leading to the reinvention of the place. To do so reference is made to various retail change theories discussing both institutional and consumer-led change.

This is a discussion paper on the findings of the HS2020 project.

The major finding reported in this paper is that the reinvention is a natural learning process that involves the comprehension of change and the development of knowledge that will lead to the reinvention of the High Street.

The findings of the research are based on data that were collected from a total of ten towns across the UK.

The paper suggests that to reinvent the High Street the stakeholders that are involved in the place decision-making processes they should embrace the change as a natural development and try to understand and learn from it rather than resisting to it. The HS2020 project provides a comprehensive guide of the areas that change can be managed and if it happens it can facilitate the reinvention.

The paper is relevant to the academic community, as it offers insight to the theories of retail change, and to the practitioners, as it provides evidence as to how to deal with the change that happens to the High Streets.

Drawing on evidence from ten towns (across England, Wales and Northern Ireland) participating in the High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020) project, the purpose of this paper is to reveal how local stakeholders involved in place management respond to high street decline through a strategy of repositioning.

This paper identifies the challenges faced by the towns considering repositioning, and highlights examples of good practice of relevance to the practitioners. First, it outlines the perspectives on repositioning from the academic research and theory, before drawing on evidence from across ten UK towns that participated in the HSUK2020 project, to reveal how repositioning involves more than just taking a snapshot profile of a place.

The research revealed major challenges faced by local stakeholders in clearly identifying and communicating their market position, in particular, the maintenance of up-to-date information on catchments was lacking at all the locations. Despite having local knowledge and some data, stakeholders still did not possess a clear (or shared) understanding of the identity or function of their towns. This evidence reflects the complexity of analysing and understanding repositioning and developing coherent strategies.

Knowledge exchange between stakeholders involved in place management can help inform the identification of new strategic objectives, appropriate interventions and project planning and delivery. Where resources are limited, particularly in smaller towns and settlements, the research demonstrates the significance of collecting and sharing data and analysis with other stakeholders, because this can generate positive outcomes for all.

By offering empirical evidence based on the experience of local practitioners, this paper provides valuable insight into how town centre stakeholders collect, interpret and analyse data, revealing the challenges, opportunities and practicalities involved in developing and implementing repositioning strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce engaged scholarship as a method for addressing the “wicked problem” of High Street change through successful collaboration and co-production of knowledge between academics, practitioners, citizens and other place stakeholders.

The first part of this paper introduces engaged scholarship as a participatory form of research and situates it within the context of the High Street. The second part presents the case of High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020) via Van de Ven’s diamond model of engaged scholarship as a guide.

Engaged scholarship’s focus on knowledge production and on collaboration between the research team and the community enabled us to improve the understanding of factors affecting High Streets amongst a diverse group of stakeholders and focus on what works for the towns. The ongoing impact of HSUK2020 on the project towns’ action plans and on this current research is testament to how engaged scholarship research can drive the agendas for both academics and communities.

The paper presents engaged scholarship as an alternative collaborative method of conducting research on the High Street, one that is more in line with the current trends in retailing and works as a motivating factor for community engagement.