Flatten or refashion Can new purpose be found for empty shopping centres?

In Bolton's town centre, the gap-toothed brutalist facade of Crompton Place shopping centre faces off against its majestic Victorian town hall.

- Sarah Butler

While the sandstone civic edifice, complete with classical columns and stone lions, evokes the mill town's heyday, time has not been kind to Crompton Place.

Opened with great fanfare in 1971, of its 46 units, only a handful of stores remain trading, including Primark and a few independents.

Inside, shoppers are few and far between in the brightly lit but low ceilinged walkways. A BHS sign still hangs on its upper floor, despite the department store chain's demise eight years ago.

It is almost the end of the line for Crompton Place, with its demolition scheduled for next year.

Bolton council, which bought Crompton Place for almost £15m from the Santander pension fund in 2018, plans to knock it down, saying the town has “a surplus of retail space”. In its place it wants to build a more attractive area that it hopes will draw new tenants to empty sites, part of a £1bn town centre redevelopment.

Crompton's demise is echoed in towns and cities across the UK. Tired shopping centres have become one of the biggest obstacles to reviving high streets. Often hemmed in by buildings and hugely expensive to overhaul, they have turned from assets to liabilities - victims of a vicious cycle of store closures. Councils are increasingly becoming the owners of last resort, buying shopping centres from investment funds.

About 60 of the UK's 500 bigger shopping centres are likely to be razed completely, and a further 200 could be partially demolished, according to a new report by the consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH).

Outside that top 500, dozens more are at risk as major chains, such as Marks & Spencer, House of Fraser and Wilko, have dramatically downsized, while a number of former anchor stores such as Debenhams and Topshop no longer have a physical high street presence.