Aberdeen's Union Street Fills Shops Faster Than It Loses Them

Aberdeen has filled 33 of the 57 vacant units on Union Street since 2023, with another 14 in the process of being let — but another 20 units have emptied in the same period, turning the city's revival effort into what one of its leaders calls a game of whack-a-mole.

The Granite City offers the clearest test case in Britain of whether high streets can be rescued through hands-on intervention. One in eight properties on British high streets is currently vacant, according to property and retail analytics firm Green Street, a figure that has stayed stubbornly high for years.

"If there was a silver bullet, it would have been fired years ago," says Jackie Sadek, a former government adviser on urban regeneration who has spent nearly four decades in town centre renewal.

Aberdeen's decline was brutal. By the end of 2022, Union Street — the Granite Mile, once packed with shoppers from across the north-east of Scotland — had hit rock bottom after residents deserted it for a shopping centre that opened in 2009 next to the railway station. The former Marks & Spencer building now stands blacked out and boarded up, one of the first sights greeting arriving train passengers.

"They'd fallen out of love with their city," says Bob Keiller, head of the Our Union Street coalition, a community-led group formed after an emergency summit. Keiller, a former FTSE 100 CEO who works unpaid, runs the operation with a wall map tracking every property with colour-coded Post-it notes.

The group audited the street, tracked down absent landlords and logged what was empty and why. Volunteers cleaned and painted vacant units to make them lettable, and still go out once a fortnight to pick litter and weed pavements. A website collates available properties alongside financial incentives, including council fit-out grants and two-year business rates discounts.

"The key thing is, we're filling quicker than emptying," Keiller insists. His operations director, David McKeith, describes the approach as putting an arm round the shoulder of those they can help and being a "wasp in the ear" of people who just say no.

The structural headwinds remain formidable. Two-thirds of town centre experts think there is still 20% to 40% too much retail space, according to a survey by retail body Revo and real estate consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton. Fractured ownership — buildings held by dozens of landlords, sometimes through offshore structures — slows regeneration. Footfall has been in long-term decline as spending moves online.

Aberdeen's answer is to spend its way toward a destination status. The council is pouring tens of millions into the city centre, anchored by a new £40m indoor food and drink market funded by the council and the UK Levelling Up Fund, plus a major seafront redevelopment. Pavements on the Victorian thoroughfare are being widened, though residents chafe at the disruption and new traffic restrictions.

The money question looms over every scheme like it. "Higher interest rates, rising costs of construction and other issues are impacting the viability and delivery of new housing and big redevelopment projects," says Steve Norris, a director at Lambert Smith Hampton. He wants "more creative ways of funding".

English councils now have a sharper tool: High Street Rental Auctions, which can force a unit vacant for at least a year onto the market even if the landlord refuses. Bassetlaw Council in Nottinghamshire, an early adopter, says more than 30 shops across the district have been let or are under offer as a result.

Private capital is also moving. Developer Robert Keane bought the Trinity shopping centre, once home to Debenhams, in 2023 — a bold call given Lambert Smith Hampton's estimate that more than one in 10 UK shopping centres is ripe for demolition. He is cutting parking costs, resetting rents and has signed a national leisure brand for the former Debenhams space.

"We saw a real good opportunity, because it was dying," Keane says. "I think by 2027 it should look and feel like a different city."

The policy backdrop is shifting too. Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Next and a Conservative peer, argues planning matters more than rates. "The most important thing that the government can do for high streets is let them develop," he says. Andy Burnham has promised further rates reform, with this month's Budget the first test of how far he will go.

On Union Street itself, the evidence is mixed but real. Lauren Reid and her mother Rose moved their fashion boutique there in 2024, helped by a council refurbishment grant. "We're getting there," she says of the sums. "I always say Rome wasn't built in a day."