Shut Up!

Shut Up!

Two hundred and eighty six shut down shops in Brighton & Hove

26 page broadsheet newspaper

520 x 375mm

September
 15th
 2008
 saw
 the 
collapse
 of 
Lehman
 Brothers,
 the
 biggest
 bankruptcy 
in
 US
 corporate
history. Six 
years
 later the
 shock
wave
 still
 reverberates
 around
 the
 globe.

Here in the UK, as the credit-crunch turned into recession, nowhere where the visual signs more obvious than our High Street shops. The rose-tinted notion of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers is fading into the past as the High Street becomes a melancholic no-man’s land, populated only by zombified window-shoppers wandering from one Starbucks to another.

With the Banks now cast in the role of the villain it is their so-called fat-cat CEOs who still take early retirement on the back of obscene golden handshakes. Shoppers now head to the utopian dream that is the Shopping Centre and out of town Retail Parks, leaving our High Streets at the mercy of ever multiplying Tesco’s Direct stores, not to mention the lure of even cheaper goods to be found on the internet.