A pair of reports has pointed to how, to quote from their titles, Britain’s high streets have been ‘hijacked’ by organised crime; and how high streets are in such a state of flux that they need a ‘framework’, in full a Legitimate High Street Framework; ‘an approach to creating legitimate, safer and resilient high streets and holding those individuals and entities accountable when they break the rules’ and do crime, under-cutting legit businesses. Neither report goes into cannabis farms.
In his famous poem titled Slough, John Betjeman wished for bombs to fall on the Berkshire town, as it was no longer ‘fit for humans’. One wonders what he would have made of the recent court case, when two men were jailed for a cannabis farm in the former BHS department store. While it’s far from the first such case, it’s worth pausing to consider: the store is on the middle of the high street, as central as a building can be (and covered by public realm CCTV, in supposedly a high-surveillance society). Like many empty BHS and Debenhams stores, has been empty for years. One cannot help but contemplate the civic failure to spot the hijacking of the place (how carefully were the managing agents looking after the property?).
Those two reports, by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think-tank and the criminologist Prof Emmeline Taylor for the Co-op respectively, each in their way call for the state to do more, about the ‘illicit economy: the expansion of the illicit tobacco market, unprecedented levels of shop theft, and the growth of rogue businesses that operate as hubs for organised criminality’, to quote Taylor. The implication that businesses are ‘rogue’, other than the norm, is also held by the Home Office. Yet so regularly do criminals set up cannabis farms in empty premises, it’s the opposite of rogue. The criminals are entrepreneurs in their way; where the state and market falter, they move in.
To give only two other examples, again from town centres: a former nightclub in Coventry, and more recently a former Barclays Bank in Clacton on Sea (only a few doors down from a branch of Greggs). In other words, cannabis farms are under the noses of people in high-footfall locations; does no-one notice the stink? It depends whether you are a glass half-full or half-empty person; the authorities are evidently, in the end, ‘disrupting’ cannabis farming; but where else is it happening, and for how long?
Portas Review
This problem is not new. In her review of high streets published in 2011, one of Mary Portas’ recommendations was that ‘banks who own empty property on the high street should either administer these assets well or be required to sell them’. She also recommended that the state empower councils with ‘Empty Shop Management Orders’. The change since for the worse has been only more marked. Whereas once visibly struggling town centres were in the de-industrialised north while the southern shires prospered, now it’s the exception, in the north and south, to have a thriving town centre, usually thanks to tourism (Bath, York, Aldeburgh, Southwold). Sittingbourne is as likely to have empty shops as Salford, Chatham as Chorley.
Trends
The problem goes against the grain of policing trends. The Labour government like the previous Conservatives champions ‘neighbourhood policing’, yet the 999 services have become blue-light emergency responders, who for lack of numbers (whatever the politicians peddle) cannot provide the forensic beat patrols to spot something odd going on in a property like a void bank or shop. This is not meant to single out the police; it’s true of numerous occupations; local government, the Church of England, the local press, have in their own ways retreated from on-the-ground presences (a melancholy experience for me in the summer of 2026 was to see two newspaper head offices, in Wolverhampton and Swindon, where I went for job interviews in the 1990s, now empty, dusty and silent).
The CSJ report is longer, and spells out how ‘‘dodgy’ vape shops, mini-marts, barbers, ‘American’ candy stores, and takeaways’ have ‘overrun shopfronts across communities’. Cannabis farms are out of sight by comparison. Indeed, the ‘dodgy’ shops (but to repeat, they are so of a pattern that to call them ‘dodgy’ is to miss the point) in the CSJ’s words ‘traffic drugs, facilitate child sexual exploitation and enable organised immigration crime’. Shoppers, let alone businesses renting office and other property, choose to go elsewhere; to out of town, gated and privately patrolled, estates. That leaves whoever’s left, notably convenience retail, to do its best on remaining high streets, as featured in the October 2026 edition of Professional Security Magazine.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Slough town centre.
