Shuttered and Forgotten: The Real Price Brighton Pays for Its Empty Shop Units

Walk down London Road on a Tuesday afternoon and you'll pass at least half a dozen shuttered units. Some have been empty for months. A few have been empty for years. The boards go up, the paint peels, and eventually the space becomes part of the furniture — something Brightonians walk past without really seeing anymore.

But those blank windows aren't neutral. They're not simply gaps waiting to be filled. They're actively costing this city money, confidence, and in some cases, entire streets their sense of purpose.

More Than an Empty Box

The instinct is to frame a vacant shopfront as a landlord's problem. Their property, their loss, their headache. But the economics of retail vacancy don't stay contained within four walls.

When a unit sits empty for an extended period, the businesses on either side start to feel it. Footfall drops. The natural rhythm of a high street — the way people drift from one shop to the next — gets broken. A hair salon next to a boarded-up unit doesn't just lose the visual appeal of an active neighbour; it loses the passing trade that comes from people already being on that stretch of pavement.

Sarah, who runs an independent gift shop near Brighton's North Laine fringe, has watched three units near her go dark over the past two years. "It changes the whole feel of the area," she says. "Customers have actually said to me, 'Oh, I nearly didn't come down here — it looked a bit dead.' That's not nothing. That's real footfall I'm not getting."

For businesses already navigating post-pandemic trading patterns and squeezed margins, 'a bit dead' can tip the balance.

What It's Doing to the Council's Books

The financial hit doesn't stop at neighbouring traders. Brighton and Hove City Council loses out significantly when commercial properties sit vacant. Business rates — the primary mechanism through which commercial occupiers contribute to local services — come with exemptions for empty properties. Under current UK rules, landlords typically pay no business rates for the first three months a property is empty, and certain categories of property can qualify for extended relief beyond that.

In practice, this means the council is collecting nothing from units that, when occupied, would be contributing meaningfully to the local tax base. Multiply that across dozens of vacant units across the city — from the faded parade shops of Portslade to the quieter stretches of Western Road — and the cumulative shortfall becomes substantial.

Urban economist and Brighton-based consultant David Marsh puts it plainly: "The empty property rates relief system was designed to help landlords through short-term voids. What it wasn't designed for is a situation where units stay empty for two, three, four years. At that point, you've essentially created a financial incentive for inaction."

It's a structural problem that national policy hasn't caught up with, and local authorities like Brighton and Hove are left managing the consequences.

Why Do Units Stay Empty So Long?

This is the question that frustrates everyone from market traders to planning officers. The answer, it turns out, is rarely simple.

In some cases, it comes down to landlord expectations that no longer match market reality. Commercial property values surged in Brighton during the early 2010s, and some landlords — particularly those holding units as long-term investments — are reluctant to drop asking rents to a level that actually attracts tenants. The logic, from their perspective, is that accepting a lower rent sets a precedent and devalues the asset on paper. The result, in practice, is years of vacancy.

"I've spoken to landlords who'd rather have an empty unit than rent it at what the market's currently bearing," says one commercial property agent who works across the city, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They're waiting for a tenant who'll pay 2019 rates. That tenant isn't coming."

Then there's the issue of physical condition. Some units, particularly on secondary high streets, have been neglected to the point where the cost of bringing them up to a lettable standard outweighs the likely rental return. Landlords defer the investment, the building deteriorates further, and the cycle continues.

Planning restrictions add another layer of complexity. Changing the use of a commercial unit — converting it to residential, for instance, or splitting it for mixed use — requires navigating a permissions process that many smaller landlords find time-consuming and uncertain. Even where demand for alternative uses clearly exists, the path from empty shop to productive space isn't always straightforward.

What's Actually Working

Not every story here is bleak. Across Brighton, a handful of approaches are genuinely shifting the needle on vacancy — and they're worth paying attention to.

Pop-up initiatives have had real success in some areas. Schemes that allow short-term licences rather than formal leases give landlords a low-commitment way to generate some income while keeping a unit active, and give emerging businesses a foothold without the exposure of a long lease. The North Laine has seen several of these work well, with temporary tenants occasionally converting into permanent ones once both parties have had a chance to test the arrangement.

Rent restructuring is another lever. Some landlords — particularly those who've accepted that the market has genuinely shifted — are moving to turnover-based rent models, where a tenant pays a percentage of their revenue rather than a fixed sum. It reduces the landlord's guaranteed income but dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for smaller businesses, particularly independents who can't commit to a fixed overhead in uncertain trading conditions.

The council has also explored meanwhile use schemes, temporarily activating vacant units for community purposes — art exhibitions, pop-up markets, workspace for charities — while longer-term solutions are worked out. These don't generate rates income, but they do maintain footfall, deter antisocial behaviour, and preserve the character of a street.

"It's not a silver bullet," admits one council planning officer, "but it keeps a space alive. And a space that feels alive is much easier to let than one that's been dark for three years and smells like it."

The Morale Factor

There's something harder to quantify at play here, too. Long-term vacancy changes how a street feels — and how the people who live and work nearby feel about it.

Brighton's identity is bound up in its independent spirit, its creative energy, its sense that this is a city where small, interesting things happen in unexpected places. Empty shopfronts corrode that identity. They signal neglect. They invite graffiti. They make the streets feel less safe after dark. And over time, they can tip a marginal area into genuine decline.

For a city that relies heavily on tourism, hospitality, and the kind of footfall that comes from people wanting to wander and discover, that's not a soft concern. It's an economic one.

The ghost retail problem isn't going to be solved by any single policy or initiative. It'll take landlords willing to recalibrate their expectations, a planning system nimble enough to facilitate genuine change of use, and a council with the tools to incentivise action rather than simply permit inaction.

In the meantime, the shutters stay down. And Brighton keeps paying the price.