A Nation of Shopkeepers? The Idealised High Street in Brexit Britain

This chapter investigates the opportunities to imagine Britain’s economic future that have proliferated in the moment of Brexit. It does so through the site of the high street and its idealisation. A dominant narrative of the high street’s decline competes for our attention with a very different set of representations that portray renewed and thriving examples of these places. These ‘model’ high streets have been seized upon as evidence that it is possible to revive town centre shopping districts and the communities that are sustained by them. Through an analysis of various material and textual instances of the idealised high street, I investigate this site as a point of entry into contemporary economic imaginaries. What kinds of desires, hopes and expectations can be traced in the idealised high street? And what do these aspirations tell us about broader economic imaginaries in Brexit Britain?