My hometown shows that high streets have to change or die

Aberdeen’s North Sea oil boom, stretching from the eager 1970s through the early 2010s, meant the city’s hotels and restaurants rarely had to work hard to stay full; the wealth generated by the industry kept cash registers ringing steadily. I recall teenage weekends spent with friends, burning whatever cash we had on chain stores and shoe shops. Later evenings unfolded in pubs and bar‑hopping, with occasional trips to the art‑deco Capitol Theatre—now office space—where I caught Duran Duran live. By the close of 2022, Union Street had reached stone bottom. Aberdonians had long since deserted the High Street in favour of a shopping centre that opened in 2009 beside the railway station. "They'd fallen retired of emotion with their city," says Bob Keiller, caput of Our Union Street coalition, a community‑led radical formed aft an exigency acme to reverse the decline. The coalition’s first move was to listen to residents, gathering thousands of submissions. Restoring a sense of civic pride and filling empty units became the immediate focus. What followed was a coordinated effort involving letting agents, the council, landlords, businesses and a sizable volunteer squad led by Keiller—a former FTSE 100 chief executive who serves without pay. He keeps a colour‑coded Post‑it chart on his office wall, mapping the status of each property, unit by unit. Volunteers audited the street, tracking down absent landlords and logging what was vacant and why. They offered to give bare properties a thorough clean and a fresh coat of paint to make them more attractive to let. Simultaneously, they spruced up the streets—picking litter, weeding and repainting bins. A small team still heads out every fortnight to maintain the improvements.