Shopping centres once seemed like bright and modern places to browse, buy, or just hang out – but the rise of the internet and the hammer blow of Covid has turned some these retail palaces into lonely, eerie wastelands
From the heady days of the 1960s right up until the turn of the Millennium, every town seemed to need a big concrete retail palace where locals could shop and socialise.
But as more and more people started buying everything they needed online, shopping centres started to seem irrelevant.
And with less footfall, some shops began to fail. Once the trickle of closures began it quickly became a torrent.
The Covid-19 pandemic was for many shopping centres the final nail in the coffin, and today many of them stand empty, a sad monument to the time when people used to go Christmas shopping rather than wait in for the Amazon driver.
Around 20% of UK shopping centre space is currently sitting vacant, and handful of malls are already completely empty, or have just one last store holding out against the inevitable march of change.
The Daily Star has rounded up some of the country’s saddest shopping centres…
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