Retail guru Mary Portas wants Prince Charles to help her revitalise Britain’s run-down high streets.
The self-appointed “queen of shops” wants Charles’s business regeneration charity to turn empty shops into community hubs.
Portas met Charles and Camilla when they toured Croydon yesterday - where one of her 27 “Portas pilots” is underway - and she said the prince “really gets it”.
She made a public plea for Charles’s charity Business in the Community (BITC) to work with her town centre schemes as they are rolled out across the country.
The aim of the pilots is to restore community pride by devising a strategy to attract customers back to town centres.
BITC is already active in west Croydon, where a senior manager from Lloyds Bank is on secondment for a year to get businesses to invest in the area to help it recover from the London riots last year.
Ms Portas wants BITC to rent empty premises that can be turned into “town shops”, showcasing the goods and distinctive produced made in each area. These would also have the potential for several businesses to trade together under one roof, creating a “one-stop shop” for customers.
She said: “I had a meeting with HRH. When he spoke he knew about this. It wasn’t just lip service.”
She appealed for the Government to do more to prevent supermarkets from continuing to open out-of-town stores, saying these should only be allowed as a last resort if no town centre sites were feasible.
She suggested the “exceptional sign-off” of Communities Secretary Eric Pickles should be necessary in each case before any more out-of-town stores were permitted.
“We talk about putting the town centre first. We talk about putting the high street first. But this [out-of-town development] is still going on.
“I genuinely believe if we want to put town centres first, then if they want to build out of town there has to be exceptional reasons - so they can way we have ‘ticked that list’ and we are unable to come into town.”
