What It Means for the Rise of Experience-Based Businesses

Empty shop fronts have become a familiar sight across Britain. In central Newport and Bradford, close to one in five shops now stand vacant. Over half of people surveyed believe their local high street is in decline, with only 13% seeing improvement. The statistics paint a consistent picture: retail footfall has continued its downward trajectory, accelerated by the pandemic but rooted in deeper structural shifts that began well before 2020.

This isn’t a story about nostalgic longing for the Woolworths of yesteryear, though that sentiment certainly exists. It’s about what happens when the infrastructure of community gathering – the physical spaces where people once naturally crossed paths – begins to disappear, and what grows in the vacuum left behind.

The Numbers Behind the Shuttered Fronts

Regional disparities have become stark. Yorkshire and the Humber has seen a 23% decline in supermarket provision, while the South experienced only 5%. The North has lost 11% of its department stores, while the South gained 12%. These aren’t merely retail statistics – they represent the loss of anchor tenants that once drew people to town centres for reasons beyond pure commerce.

The traditional high street served multiple functions simultaneously. People went to buy things, certainly, but also to see neighbours, to have chance encounters, to feel part of a physical community. When shops close, that ambient social infrastructure erodes. The high street was never just about shopping – it was about being somewhere together.

The Experience Economy as Response

Into this gap has stepped something different. The UK events industry is anticipated to reach $310 billion by 2035, with a growth rate of 13.10% annually. London’s West End, in particular, has seen major investments in immersive experiences, with record-breaking footfall and multimillion-pound projects. Immerse LDN has become the UK’s largest immersive entertainment district, housing attractions like The Friends Experience and the Formula 1 Exhibition, with new Elvis and Tutankhamun experiences planned.

This isn’t coincidental timing. As retail withdraws, experience-based businesses have expanded to fill both the physical space and the social function previously served by traditional commerce. Escape rooms, immersive theatre, interactive exhibitions – these aren’t simply entertainment products. They’re engineered social environments designed to bring people together around shared activity rather than shared consumption.

The distinction matters. Shopping was often a solitary act dressed up as a social one – people went to town centres together but frequently dispersed into individual browsing. Experience-based activities, by contrast, require collective participation. They create structures for interaction that don’t rely on pre-existing social groups.

What Makes Experiences Different

There’s a practical element here that bears examining. Escape rooms typically accommodate groups of two to ten people working through puzzles collaboratively. Immersive theatre productions place audiences inside the narrative space, often requiring them to make choices or interact with performers. Walking tours, craft workshops, historical explorations – all of these create frameworks for strangers to engage with each other through a shared focus.

This matters particularly for those attending alone. The high street offered little accommodation for the solo visitor beyond perhaps a coffee shop with a book. Experience venues, increasingly, have begun structuring their offerings to welcome individuals without making them feel conspicuous. Some events now include hosts or facilitators specifically to ease introductions and break initial awkwardness.

Platforms like UK Socials have emerged partly in response to this shift, curating access to activities that might otherwise require prior social coordination to attend. The model acknowledges that many people want to participate in cultural and social activities but lack an immediate circle to do so with – a problem the traditional high street, for all its faults, at least provided proximity to solve.

The Broader Cultural Shift

A House of Lords report has called for looking beyond retail to reverse high street decline, recognising that restoring town centres cannot simply mean returning to their previous commercial form. The decline has revealed that the underlying need – for communal spaces and shared experiences – was never really about shopping at all.

What people seem to miss about the old high street isn’t the act of purchasing items. It’s the ambient community it represented: seeing familiar faces, having unplanned conversations, feeling embedded in a local social fabric. Experience-based businesses don’t replicate this exactly – they’re more intentional, more curated, often more expensive – but they address the same fundamental human requirement for connection through physical presence.

The growth isn’t uniform. London has seen particularly significant investment, with new venues and districts specifically designed around immersive entertainment. Regional cities have followed similar patterns on smaller scales, often converting vacant retail spaces into escape rooms, art studios, or community activity centres. The economic logic is straightforward: experiential offerings command higher margins than retail and can’t be undercut by online alternatives in the same way physical goods can.

What Gets Lost and What Gets Gained

There’s an obvious critique here: experience-based activities require more planning, more financial commitment, and more deliberate participation than simply wandering into a shop. They’re less spontaneous, less accessible to those with limited disposable income, less woven into the everyday rhythms of life.

This is worth acknowledging. The old high street, for all its commercial focus, had a democratic quality. Anyone could walk down it. Experiences, by their nature, erect barriers to entry – tickets to purchase, time slots to book, often implicit expectations about who belongs in which spaces.

Yet what’s emerging in response is a more diverse ecosystem than might initially appear. Community centres have begun offering more structured programming. Libraries have expanded into event spaces. Parks host organised activities – outdoor yoga, guided walks, photography workshops – that blend the accessibility of public space with the intentionality of curated experience.

Online platforms that aggregate these opportunities serve a particular function: making visible the range of options that exist but might otherwise require significant research to discover. For someone new to an area, or someone whose immediate social circle doesn’t share their interests, these aggregators lower the activation energy required to participate.

The Longer View

The shift from retail-based to experience-based social infrastructure isn’t complete, and perhaps shouldn’t be. Some high streets have found hybrid models – independent shops that also host events, cafes that double as gallery spaces, bookshops that run reading groups and author talks. These spaces acknowledge that commerce and community don’t have to be opposing forces.

What seems clear is that the old model – rows of chain stores anchored by department stores, with socialising as an incidental byproduct – has failed to sustain itself. The reasons are multiple: online retail, changing consumer habits, rent structures that favour large corporate tenants over local independents, car-centric planning that drained footfall from town centres.

But beneath these economic explanations runs a social question: what do people actually need from their physical communities? The answer appears to be more than just places to buy things. They need structures for interaction, reasons to leave their homes, frameworks that facilitate connection without requiring them to already have extensive local networks.

Experience-based businesses, at their best, provide this. They create containers for social activity that are accessible to individuals, not just established groups. They offer shared focus – solving a puzzle, watching a performance, learning a skill – that makes interaction feel purposeful rather than forced.

Where This Leaves Us

The UK high street won’t return to its previous form. That much seems settled. What replaces it matters not just economically but socially. If the new infrastructure of community gathering is exclusively commercial, expensive, and exclusive, it will fail to serve the same broad social function the high street once did.

If, however, the growth of experience-based offerings can be paired with publicly accessible spaces and activities – community-run events, free cultural programming, parks and libraries as social hubs – then perhaps what emerges will be more intentional and more inclusive than what existed before.

The test will be whether someone can build a social life in their local area without substantial financial resources or pre-existing connections. The old high street, for all its limitations, at least offered that possibility. The challenge for whatever comes next is to do the same, but better – to create spaces and structures that don’t just enable chance encounters but actively facilitate meaningful connection.