Bury's indoor market hall has been shut since October 2023, when reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete was found in its roof and 49 businesses were displaced overnight. In the Budget, the Government announced £10 million for the hall through its new Local Renewal Fund — the most significant step yet towards reopening one of the town's best-known buildings. "Today's Budget announcement of £10 million for Bury Indoor Market is a huge win for our town," said Bury North MP James Frith. "Bury Indoor Market is one of our town's most iconic assets. Its loss was tragic to both traders and our community."
That is what fighting back looks like in 2026: not a slogan, but a funding announcement and a reopening date. This article is about the towns doing the fighting; a companion article on this site looks at what shoppers notice as the high street changes around them.
Bury: £10 million and a market hall coming back
The Bury story is worth telling in full, because it shows how long a fightback takes. The hall closed in October 2023. By April 2025 more than £268,000 had been spent subsidising displaced traders, and the total cost of the emergency response had passed £950,000, according to the Bury Times. A new indoor food, drinks and events hall, Casewells, is due to open on 26 November.
The £10 million sits alongside a £33 million regeneration of the wider Bury Market, including enhancements to the outdoor market and a new flexi hall. The town has also joined a new Greater Manchester Markets' Partnership, launched in Bury in December 2025, bringing together all ten Greater Manchester councils.
"Markets are vital to local economies and sit at the heart of thriving communities," said Councillor Eamonn O'Brien, leader of Bury Council, at the launch.
York: the vacancy gap that shows what is possible
If Bury shows the fight, York shows the result. City of York Council's own figures put vacant shops in the city centre at 5.6% in February 2026, down from 7.0% a year earlier — against a national vacancy rate of about 13.5% from the Local Data Company. In September 2025 the gap was similar: York city centre at 6.2% against a national rate of 13.7%. York's Shambles, a narrow medieval street of independent shops, has become a destination in its own right: people travel to see it, and they spend in the surrounding streets while they are there.
York is not a typical town — it has two universities, a world-famous Minster and millions of visitors a year. But the size of the gap matters: a city-centre vacancy rate less than half the national average is not an accident. It is the product of a centre that gives people a reason to visit beyond buying something.
The festival calendar is the clearest version of that lesson. The Ludlow Food Festival, held inside Ludlow Castle, ran from 11 to 13 September 2026 with more than 180 producer stalls, the town's biggest weekend of the year.
Newport: the hardest-hit city fighting back
The fightback is not only happening in pretty market towns. Newport had the highest city-centre shop vacancy rate in the UK, at 19%, in a Centre for Cities report published in July 2025 — more than twice the rate in London, at 8.5%, and well above Bradford at 17.6%.
But the report also recorded change. Newport's vacancy rate had fallen by around 20% over the previous year, with much of the change the result of start-ups taking up space. Footfall in the first quarter of 2025 was 10% higher than in the first quarter of 2019 — before the pandemic. The Centre for Cities argued that bringing residential development into city centres is key: people living above the shops are customers every day of the week, not just on market day.
What the national figures say
Nationally, the picture is still difficult, and any honest account of a fightback has to say so. The British Retail Consortium–Sensormatic footfall monitor, published on 6 November 2026, recorded total UK footfall down 4.7% year on year in October, with high streets down 5.2% — the steepest fall since April — after back-to-back named storms Austen and Boelo. "Footfall fell sharply in every part of the UK in October," said Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium.
A year earlier, October 2025 told a different story: total footfall fell just 0.7%, and high streets were the only destination to grow, up 0.6%, with footfall on Halloween itself jumping 4.6%. The contrast between the two Octobers is the point. The fightback is real in individual towns, but it is not yet strong enough to lift the national figures in a bad month. About 13.7% of shops stood empty nationally in September 2025, according to the Local Data Company.
The costs traders cannot control
Councils hold some of the levers: parking charges and availability, street cleaning, markets, planning decisions and the events calendar. A clean, safe, well-lit town centre with somewhere sensible to park makes a difference traders notice immediately. Traders frequently argue that expensive or scarce parking pushes shoppers towards retail parks and online, where parking is free; councils reply that parking income pays for services.
What councils cannot do is just as important. They do not set business rates — the tax on commercial premises that traders regularly name as one of their heaviest burdens. Rates are based on the rental value of a property, and for many small shops they land before a single customer walks in. The Government told Parliament in March 2025 that it had launched a £1.5 billion Plan for Neighbourhoods covering 75 places, and introduced High Street Rental Auctions, a power for councils to auction the lease of commercial properties that have stood persistently vacant.
Rent is the other pressure. Where landlords would rather hold out for a higher rent than accept a lower one from a local trader, units can sit empty for years. The towns doing best are often those where landlords, councils and traders actually talk to each other, rather than each waiting for someone else to move first.
And the stakes are wider than shopping. A busy high street is not just a retail story. Every shop that opens creates local jobs, often the first jobs young people in the town get. Busy streets feel safer — there are people about, lights on, eyes on the street — in a way an empty parade of shutters never does.
So is the high street saved? The verdict is narrower, and more encouraging, than that. The old high street — the one built on big chains selling the same goods in every town — is not coming back. But Bury has £10 million and a reopening to plan for, York's vacancy rate is less than half the national average, and Newport's footfall is running 10% above 2019. The towns following that logic are building something different in its place, and the figures, town by town, are starting to show it.