After the Escalator: What Britain’s Empty Department Stores Are Becoming

The escalator is the tell. In a working department store it has a gentle, purposeful hum. In a dead one it is a sculpture: stopped, dusty, waiting for someone to decide whether to rip it out or call it heritage. Britain has a lot of these stopped escalators. Debenhams vanished from the high street in 2021; House of Fraser has been shrinking and reinventing itself for years. The buildings they left behind are enormous, awkward and often listed. They are also, in a handful of towns, becoming something unexpectedly interesting.

This is not a story about saving the department store. It is a story about what happens after the perfume counters and the pick-and-mix. I visited three conversions in different parts of the UK — a former Debenhams in Stockport, a former House of Fraser in Taunton and a former Debenhams in Dundee — to see whether the old shells can become genuine cultural anchors or whether they are just nostalgia projects with good lighting.

Stockport: the former Debenhams that became a living room

Stockport’s Merseyway shopping centre still has the slightly haunted feel of a precinct that peaked in 1997. But the former Debenhams unit has been split into something more porous. The ground floor is a food hall with long shared tables and a rotating cast of local traders; the first floor holds a micro-gallery, a repair café and a small co-working space; the upper floors are being let to a dance studio and a community radio station.

“We were determined not to make it a museum of retail,” says Lena Mahmood, cultural programmer for the project. “The building had to earn its keep. That meant mixed uses, cheap rents for makers and a programme that changes every six weeks. If you come back in March, it will look different.”

Mahmood says the hardest part was not the architecture but the psychology. “People had a relationship with Debenhams. They bought their school shoes there. Some of them were angry that it had gone. We had to show that the building could still be useful without pretending the old shop was coming back.”

The food hall helps. So does the repair café, which runs on the first Saturday of the month and has become a quiet social hub for older residents. “You get a seventy-year-old bringing in a toaster and a twenty-year-old fixing it,” Mahmood says. “That is a cultural exchange, even if it does not look like one.”

Taunton: climbing wall and community archive

In Taunton, the former House of Fraser on Fore Street has become The Yard, a deliberately scruffy complex that combines a climbing wall, a community archive and a small events space. The archive is the surprise. It holds donated photographs, shop ledgers and oral histories from the town’s retail past — not as a dusty memorial, but as raw material for workshops and exhibitions.

“We did not want to be a heritage centre,” says Gareth Pike, the project lead. “We wanted the past to be something you could climb over, quite literally. The climbing wall is in the old stockroom. The archive is where the perfume counter used to be. People come in for a session and end up recording a story about their mum working in the shop.”

The Yard is not polished. The changing rooms are basic; the café is a hatch; the archive is staffed partly by volunteers. But it is busy on a wet Wednesday afternoon, which is more than can be said for many high-street units. Pike admits the funding model is fragile. “We have a mix of grants, membership income and event hire. It works for now. But buildings like this need long-term thinking, not just a one-off rescue.”

Dundee: studios in the Wellgate

Dundee’s former Debenhams, in the Wellgate Centre, has taken a different route. The upper floors have been converted into affordable studios for artists, designers and small creative businesses, with a shared exhibition space and a shop on the ground floor. It is called Wellgate Makes, and on the day I visit there is a queue for a zine fair.

“The rent is the whole thing,” says Fiona Brae, a curator who helps run the space. “Creative people cannot work if they are spending all their money on a studio. We have makers here who would otherwise have left Dundee. That is a cultural anchor, even if it does not look like a traditional gallery.”

The building still has the low ceilings and fluorescent lighting of a retail block, but the studios have been softened with plants, lamps and paint. The shop sells ceramics, prints and jewellery, with a clear label on each item saying who made it and where. “People want to know the story,” Brae says. “That is what the old department store used to sell, in a way. A story about taste and belonging. We are just telling a different one.”

Can they become cultural anchors?

There is a temptation to overclaim. A food hall and a climbing wall do not fix the structural problems of the British high street: business rates, online shopping, declining footfall, the slow death of the weekly shop. Nor do they replace the jobs that were lost when the department stores closed. But they do something subtler. They keep the lights on in buildings that might otherwise become car parks or flats. They give small organisations a chance to grow. And they create a kind of public interior that is increasingly rare: a place you can sit without buying a coffee, or at least without feeling guilty about it.

The risks are real. Mixed-use conversions can become bland: the same craft-beer bar, the same neon sign, the same “curated” market. The successful ones I visited shared three things: cheap rents for local people, a programme that changes, and a willingness to let the building be slightly odd. Stockport’s repair café, Taunton’s archive, Dundee’s zine fair — these are not glamorous. They are the opposite of a department store’s polished theatre. But they are alive.

The department store is dead. The building, if we are lucky, is not. In 2026, the question is not whether these old shells can be saved. It is whether we can resist turning them into something too tidy. The best reinventions feel like a conversation between the old shop and the new town — not a eulogy, not a museum, but a room that has been rearranged for the people who actually live there.