Marks & Spencer’s announcement last month that it would close more than 100 stores by 2022 sent shockwaves along UK high streets. In 2015, Aldershot lost theirs – and this is what happened next

Beneath the ghostly imprint of the Marks & Spencer lettering, Kerryann Wade recalls the day management called staff upstairs to a meeting. It was June 2015 and the store in Aldershot had survived, while shops around it disappeared. Just a few doors along the Hampshire town’s High Street, two other units bear traces of busier times; Woolworths, shut in 2008, sits next to Blockbuster Express, which clung on until 2013. Both stores remain empty.

“We were all thinking: ‘Where’s the champagne?’ Because we were usually called upstairs to hear how well the store was doing,” Wade, 42, recalls. A handle is falling off the store’s old glass doors. Wade has kept the alcohol licence sign that hung above the door because it bore her name as the former food manager. “But when we got there, they said ‘Sit down’, and I said: ‘No, I want to hear it now.’”

After almost 90 years on the site, which stretches through to another entrance on Union Street, M&S announced it would leave Aldershot and its once-thriving shopping area. It would be a blow for customers and 45 members of staff. But when a retail mainstay closes its doors – a worry for towns across the country after M&S’s announcement last month that it plans to close more than 100 stores by 2022 – the effects can be complex. In the same way that developers and councils beg “keystone” or “anchor” tenants to bring prestige and footfall to high streets and shopping centres, their departure can leave holes that only grow deeper.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kerryann Wade outside M&S’s main entrance. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

“I can say it has taken 30 to 40% off my business,” says Ranjita Malla, who runs Shreyaz Fashion, a few doors along from M&S’s old Union Street entrance. She opened the clothing and jewellery store in 2011, in a former British Heart Foundation charity shop. “When we opened, we were always busy and we had three or four staff.” Malla now stands alone behind the till six days a week. “People came not just from Aldershot but from nearby villages to the M&S and they would pop into other shops as well,” she says. “Now they have no reason to come.”

Malla’s rent is going up while takings dive. She will make a decision about the future at the end of the summer. “Only hope is keeping me going since M&S closed,” she adds.

Elsewhere in Aldershot, which sits between prosperous towns including Farnborough, Farnham and Camberley, the retail map is no less tattered. There are mixed messages at Poundworld on Wellington Street, where a freshly printed notice of administration has been taped to the window, next to an appeal for new sales assistants. The chain announced its bankruptcy the day before my visit. In the Wellington shopping centre, Mothercare is due to close soon, while shutters block the bridge that leads to the Galleries. The entire mall, an extension to the Wellington that was built in the 1990s with 21 shops, has been frozen in time for almost a decade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aldershot’s Blockbuster store, which ceased trading in 2013. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

The walk of a couple of hundred metres from the M&S entrance on High Street, around to its Union Street entrance, is a graveyard of British retail. After a shuttered snooker bar and convenience store, I pass the Woolworths and Blockbuster. On the corner, Party Buz occupies the old Burton and Dorothy Perkins stores, which shut shortly before M&S. The other side of the Woolworths on Union Street is boarded up. Topshop used to be next, but this store and its neighbour have long been empty. I watch workmen gut the next store along: Mangobean, a cafe that opened months before M&S closed, to be replaced by a branch of Next. Card Factory and Claire’s have survived, but then it’s Timpson, which shut in March this year, before I’m back at M&S. That’s 15 shopfronts in a row, 10 of which are abandoned.

Reduced consumer spending, the growth of online retail and rising rents and business rates are challenging high streets everywhere. Aldershot has its own story, too. Its population of more than 35,000 has fluctuated with the advance and retreat of its biggest employer; Aldershot was a tiny village until the British army established a vast garrison here in the 1850s. By the time its M&S closed, it had become an outlet store, selling discounted lines from the chain’s warehouses, alongside a full food store. But Wade says trade was good. Surviving business owners and shoppers recall the closure as the biggest recent blow to the town’s fortunes.

“It was the only big name that could still attract people here,” says Sunday Karapinar, who runs Poppins Restaurant, opposite Shreyaz Fashion. The Turkish-born entrepreneur has served customers on Union Street since 1991. “I used to see the same faces once or twice a week.” Takings also fell steeply in the weeks after the M&S shut, Karapinar says. As well as being a destination on Union Street, the store funnelled customers into town from High Street, which is opposite a car park.

If Union Street got quieter when M&S left, High Street suffered even more. Wade remembers when the Three Wishes gift shop opened there in early 2015, purely to pick up M&S traffic. Three Wishes hung on until last summer. Its owners preferred not to relive the decline. Lee Pearce might have suffered a similar fate. The former army software tester opened his own gift shop on High Street in 2007. Inspirations thrived and expanded, but online trade was already dominating when the M&S closure all but emptied his store of shoppers. Last year, he moved out of High Street to a purpose-built warehouse. “The economics of these big stores is that they bring people in and we feed off the crumbs,” he says. “Once they go, the people go, and before you know it there’s a snowball effect.”

Retail analysts and academics are only beginning to grapple with this effect. “The evidence hasn’t been gathered because losing these big stores at this level has only been happening in the past 12 to 18 months,” says Chris Parry, a retail expert and principal lecturer in accounting and finance at Cardiff Metropolitan University. “But I think when we have it, it will be a compelling picture.” Diane Wehrle, an analyst at the retail intelligence firm Springboard, describes a cycle of decline when a big-name tenant packs up: “Fewer shoppers come in, so existing businesses find it harder to survive. When they fail, it increases the vacancy rate again, which only makes the centre less attractive, so fewer shoppers come ...”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A sign of things to come. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Dejected shoppers contribute by talking down towns and taking their custom elsewhere. “It’s got really bad here,” says Louisa Greaves, who is pushing her 10-week-old daughter, Evelyn, along Union Street. “There’s nothing. I only come here for nappies and baby bottles now, but I avoid coming into town.” If they don’t go to Lidl, which is central, former M&S food shoppers now drive to Tesco or Morrisons on the edge of town. The Morrisons adjoins the successful Westgate centre, which opened in 2013 and includes a Cineworld, Nando’s and Pizza Express. But residents say that it only draws people away from the town centre.

Older shoppers and those with mobility problems say the closure hit them hardest, forcing them to depend on reduced bus services or expensive taxis. “I loved the food and the trousers because I could get my size, I’ve only got wee short legs,” says Mary King, who is 89 and moved here from Glasgow in 1946. King is sitting outside the Gala bingo opposite the M&S High Street entrance with her friend Maggie Lawless. The pair used to pop in for food and clothes every week. “It was heartbreaking when it shut,” King says. “People shop online, but who wants to stay indoors day after day?”

The closure of M&S came in spite of a local campaign to save it. During three frantic months, more than 10,000 shoppers and storekeepers signed an online and clipboard petition, fearing M&S would take with it the heart of Aldershot. The then MP, Sir Gerald Howarth, had a meeting with M&S at the House of Commons. But the campaign had no effect. “The impact was devastating,” says Keith Bean, a local car salesman and amateur historian, who led the campaign. “It was so deflating – I just sat there thinking: ‘God, no, this is the last thing the town needs.’”

M&S said at the time that it was closing five outlet stores because changes in stock management meant they had less surplus clothing to sell. In a statement this week, the company says it always regrets closures. “We understand that there is an impact locally and for our people and, as was the case in Aldershot, we always offer all our colleagues roles in nearby stores.” Thirty-five of the 45 staff in Aldershot were redeployed, adds the company.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If I leave this to the market to fix, it will take 20 years’ … councillor David Clifford. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Bean grew up in Aldershot and hates its reputation. “You’ve got all these salubrious towns around us and the local nickname is ‘Alder-shit’, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” he says. He is cautiously optimistic about the local authority’s plans to revive the town. The Borough of Rushmoor also covers Farnborough, which is bigger, but, since May 2016, an Aldershot boy, David Clifford, has been the council’s leader. “I’ve got family who live here and I will get grief if I do not do what’s needed,” says Clifford, who runs a local embroidery business and has been a councillor since 1991.

Clifford is so full of ambition for Aldershot that he almost levitates while waving his arms on Union Street. He prefers not to dwell on the empty M&S, despite the shadow it casts over a quiet flow of lunchtime shoppers. “In my mind, it wasn’t the end of the world. Town centres do not survive just because there’s an M&S,” he says. “There needs to be a change in how we put together our town centres, and if we rely on retail we are going to have problems.”

Clifford is a proud Tory, who adores Theresa May, but some of the measures he is taking are a drastic break from free-market orthodoxy. With the help of loans and housing grants from Westminster, Rushmoor is buying buildings on Union Street. It now owns the Woolworths, Blockbuster and two other units, and is using the threat of compulsory purchase to buy more. “We’re a Conservative council but if I leave this to the market it will take 20 years,” Clifford says. Instead, the council wants to speed up plans to turn empty upstairs store rooms into flats, and empty stores into “flexible” retail units. There are plans to replace the ghost shopping centre with fewer stores and 400 homes. Clifford also wants to reconfigure the top end of Union Street.

What was the last thing Clifford bought in Aldershot? He thinks for a while. “I think it was some novelty socks,” he says. The council leader is banking on resurgent footfall thanks to his interventions, and the construction of thousands of homes on former army land on the edge of town. He wants young families to move in; direct trains reach London in less than an hour. But there’s a whiff of chicken and egg about that hope. New residents might come to new stores, but will the stores come back before the shoppers do? Clifford is upbeat after hearing that the B&M chain is in talks to move into the M&S site, but B&M tell me they will not be doing so. They decline to confirm that they were in talks about the site, or to explain the decision to stay away.

Wade buys only the occasional greeting card in Aldershot. She hopes that the civic pride that sustained the campaign to save the M&S will endure until things improve. In the meantime, she can no longer bear to look at the abandoned store when she walks to her new job at Tesco (childcare logistics meant she could not afford to commute to another M&S). “I still speak to quite a few of my old customers and they still can’t believe it’s gone,” she says.

Wade says the 10 workers who did not move to other branches have stayed mainly in retail, including the Aldershot branch of Boots (several declined to speak to me). She still speaks to some of her old colleagues, and remembers fondly the camaraderie of the Aldershot branch. “We lived here, basically,” she adds, before picking her two sons up from school. “It became part of us.”

• The caption on the second picture from the top was amended on 18 June 2018 to correct the spelling of Kerryann Wade’s first name from Kellyanne.

