HEN Webinar Recording: April - Ghost Towns: High Streets and Health Inequalities

Health Equity Network Monthly Webinar: April - Ghost Towns: High Streets and Health Inequalities

This month's webinar featured colleagues from Health Equity North — Eman Zied and Hannah Davies — presenting findings from their Ghost Towns report and the associated paper published in Social Science & Medicine. The session offered a compelling look at how the physical fabric of our high streets is both a reflection and a driver of health inequality.

Health Equity North is a virtual institute focused on place-based solutions to health inequalities, whose reports — including Health For Wealth, Woman of the North and Child of the North — have influenced policy at regional, national and international level.

Key findings and themes

The changing high street.

The central argument of the Ghost Towns work is that high streets in the most deprived parts of England have undergone a dramatic shift over the past decade. While more affluent areas have broadly maintained a diverse mix of amenities, deprived communities are seeing a net loss of supermarkets and public toilets alongside a net gain of takeaways, bookmakers and vape shops. This is not simply a story of economic decline — it is a story with direct consequences for health behaviours and outcomes.

Place as a determinant of health.

The discussion underlined how strongly the physical environment of a neighbourhood shapes the choices available to people living there. Access to healthy food, safe public spaces, green areas and public transport are not luxuries — they are conditions that support or undermine health. As one participant noted, access to the high street and how safe and welcoming it feels is likely as central to health as nutrition itself.

Left behind neighbourhoods.

Hannah Davies referenced Health Equity North's earlier work with the APPG for Left Behind Neighbourhoods, which developed an index combining deprivation with access to amenities. That work similarly found that the communities facing the greatest material hardship are also those with the least access to green space, public transport and public health infrastructure — reinforcing how multiple disadvantages compound one another.

Why this matters

The Ghost Towns findings are a reminder that health equity work cannot stop at the clinic or the community programme. The conditions of the places people live — what their high street offers, what it has lost, what it was never given — are upstream determinants that shape everything downstream. For those working in local government, public health, housing or community development, this research offers both an evidence base and a provocation to look more closely at what the high streets in your area are telling you.

The recording is available HERE.