Let us walk down a local high street in the noisy hubbub of a Victorian summer just over a century ago. Costermongers hawk their wares; children stare at huge lollipops in the grocer’s window alongside piles of potted jams and pickles; gaily striped awnings protect the butcher’s meats from the sun; the sweet smell of bread escapes from the baker’s open door; the inn advertises, in large gold-leafed letters, that “Ales, Stout & Porter” are for sale. Market stalls, horse dung, water troughs, gently curving Georgian bay windows thick with a century’s encrusted paint. All life is here.

A nostalgic memory? Undoubtedly. But for many a painful one. In too many high streets the current reality is one of no homes, fewer shops and scarce businesses. Many lovely Victorian and early 20th century shops are in desperate peril.

The Victorian Society’s top 10 endangered buildings list includes a Peckham department store and a Stoke-on-Trent indoor market. Just last month, Westminster council shamefully gave M&S permission to demolish its beautiful 1930 Oxford Street branch to replace it with a tedious and unvarying grid of identical windows. We can call this “spreadsheet architecture”.

These buildings are universally lamented as soon as they are lost, but somehow it carries on happening. Nobody argues that our towns are improved by their loss. Nobody argues that it is more environmentally friendly to replace them rather than refurbish them. And yet these buildings continue to go.

We can, however, go some way towards correcting this horrific trend. The aftermath of the pandemic, which has exacerbated the crumbling of traditional high street infrastructure, has given us an opportunity.

Vanishingly few early 20th century traditional buildings are listed by Historic England, trapped by a definition of “architectural significance” that regards architectural history as a fast train to modernism. No specialised body exists whose heart is in the fight for these lovely buildings with their rich stylistic range: Bankers’ Georgian, Deco, Classical, Néo-Grec, Wrenaissance, and so on. So let us empower those who have the capacity to take this task on.

We should then adapt the VAT system, which is biased in favour of new builds versus renovation. This particularly matters in “left behind” towns where most incentives are to let high streets rot and restart elsewhere. The Government should make it VAT-free to bring derelict buildings back into use or charge a reduced rate of 5 per cent.

Most importantly, we should let high streets come back to complex life again as agreeable places where people live and work as well as shop.

Internet shopping is here to stay, but thanks to welcome innovations over the past decade, mechanisms exist which councils could use to make it easier for owners to invest in converting buildings for other uses. None are fully taking the opportunity, nervous of ceding control.

A flourishing high street is an attractive place where people wish to live, to meet, to converse, to buy, to sell and to be amused.

We cannot go back to the 1890s but there’s nothing to stop future high streets being even better. And there won’t be any horse dung.

Nicholas Boys Smith is the Director of Create Streets