Aberdeen is launching an ambitious bid to revive its struggling centre. Could it offer lessons for other high streets?

Published54 minutes ago

The empty building that used to be the home of Marks & Spencer in Aberdeen is one of the first things you see when you arrive off the train and come into the city centre. The sign has gone, though the shape of the lettering can still be made out; the windows are blacked out and the doors boarded up

This is my hometown. As a teenager, I spent hours on Union Street, its main thoroughfare, nicknamed the Granite Mile after the local silver-grey stone. It was the place to try on all the latest fashions from the likes of Clockhouse and Chelsea Girl

The street used to be packed with shoppers from across the north-east of Scotland

Now, it's pockmarked with empty shops

"I come to Union Street to take a bus somewhere else... there's nothing to shop for now… it's horrendous," complains Marie Sim, a lifelong Aberdeen resident

It's a similar story across the country: High Streets, once bursting with shops, hit first by the rise of out-of-town retail centres and then by online commerce

But Aberdeen is in the thick of an ambitious turnaround plan. The port city has essentially declared war on its empty shop problem, taking an unusually hands-on approach to filling vacant units and bringing long-neglected upper floors of buildings into use

The Marks & Spencer flagship store in Aberdeen closed in August, 80 years after it opened there