popular destinations for other retailers.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the growth of Next in the 1980s and 1990s almost parallels the growth of high street rents as they were prepared to pay very high premiums for the best pitches (which did, however, cause them some financial problems in the mid-1990s). Fernie et al. (1997) note how the recent influx of top fashion stores in the West End of London has shot rents to more than 250 per sq. ft. Figure 3.1 shows the current rents for many top European cities to be high and buoyant. However, the future of the high street has long been a concern to planners, especially as fears of the competitive effects of out-of-town developments increased. In Europe, for example, there are fears that cities may follow US dynamics, where downtown cores are office and service centres as opposed to core retail areas. Therefore, there is now much interest in what makes a successful city centre, and how the city centre can remain an important future retail landscape. Peter Shearman Associates (1996) undertook an exercise to try and answer this question by comparing the cities of Hanover, Bordeaux and Bristol. They concluded that a successful city centre must: