Too few Scots are proud of their high street

8 June 2011

Policy Director Ross Martin was interviewed for a piece on town centres.

"He said that most of Scotland's town centres were at best in a state of arrested decay and at worst suffering accelerating decline. The "one-off sticking plaster" of the Town Centre Regeneration Fund has done its best, but much more needed to be done to turn the "rhetoric, and our ambitions, into a reality we can be rightly proud of".

"There is a movement in Scotland away from bland High Streets and towards much more distinctive town centres. And I think that when people say they are not in love with their town centres, part of it is that they are not in love with the homogenous High Street you can see in any town centre in any place."

"There is a very strong movement in Scotland towards a more localised mix and people are starting to think about what their town centre is for – whether it is primarily a retail destination or whether we should be doing more, for example, in developing the night time economy."

Click here to read more from our towns policy work.