‘It was heartbreaking’: can a town survive when its M&S closes?

Marks & Spencer's announcement last month that it would close more than 100 stores by 2022 sent shockwaves along UK high streets. In 2015, Aldershot lost theirs - and this is what happened next

Beneath the ghostly imprint of the Marks & Spencer lettering, Kerryann Wade recalls the day management called staff upstairs to a meeting. It was June 2015 and the store in Aldershot had survived, while shops around it disappeared. Just a few doors along the Hampshire town's High Street, two other units bear traces of busier times; Woolworths, shut in 2008, sits next to Blockbuster Express, which clung on until 2013. Both stores remain empty.

"We were all thinking: 'Where's the champagne?' Because we were usually called upstairs to hear how well the store was doing," Wade, 42, recalls. A handle is falling off the store's old glass doors. Wade has kept the alcohol licence sign that hung above the door because it bore her name as the former food manager. "But when we got there, they said 'Sit down', and I said: 'No, I want to hear it now.'"