An Investigation of the Impact and Resilience of British high streets following the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need to quantify the impacts of and resilience to the retail- specific lockdownson British high streets. The concept of resilience has become widely used in academic research but has not accounted for the impacts of sweeping government restrictions during the pandemic. The aim of this paper is to use the concept of resilience to analyse the impact of government-enforced closures of ‘non-essential’ retail stores on British high streets by producing a high street resilience classification based on the proportion of stores forced to close and indicators that influence an area’s ability to withstand shock.