Pictures reveal the decline of Dudley town centre

What a difference three decades makes on the high street. Mark Andrews looks at how one town has changed

Only one retailer, W H Smith, which features in these pictures from the mid 1980s, survives to the present day.

The broken sign of troubled discount clothes retailer Ethel Austin – which has just been saved from administration by yet another buy-out – stands as a testimony to how the town has been ravaged more than almost anywhere else by the changes to the retail industry of the last quarter of a century.

Click on the image on the right to see more pictures.

Back in 1985, it was home to electrical giant Curry's. Two doors away was another electrical retailer, the old-established Wigfalls – now an amusement arcade takes its place.

At least when Marks & Spencer joined the mass exodus to the rate-free Merry Hill Centre in 1990, another large multiple retailer, Wilkinson, moved in. And the Thomas Cook travel agents, in the former Olivers Shoes shop, has escaped this week's cull of the chain's branches.

But the old Frames travel agent in Wolverhampton Street has made way for a bookies, while the Curtess Shoes shop and the Lancaster & Thorpe opticians have been replaced by cafes and takeaways.

Some of the changes are just the natural turnover of a changing town – the House of Arni hair salon in Wolverhampton Street has been replaced by a nail spa, while the Smiths giftshop is now home to a new hairdresser.

But what is beyond doubt is that there have been huge changes to Dudley over the last 25 to 30 years, and you would be hard pressed to think of any that are for the better. In the early 1980s Dudley had three large department stores: Beatties, Debenhams and F W Cook. Today it has none.

Cook's, in particular, which had been in Dudley since 1819, was a major focus for the town, its thriving coffee lounge with a rocking horse for children being an established meeting place for shoppers. Today it is occupied by a fast-food outlet, a pool bar and a convenience store.

Part of the old Debenhams store is now a boarded up, disused McDonalds, while the other half is a J D Wetherspoon pub. Beatties closed its doors for the last time in January last year, and its ground floor is now occupied by an Iceland freezer centre.

One rare bright spot is that an un-named "large international retailer" is said to be about to open a new store at the former BHS in the market place, 20 years after the clothing retailer decamped to Merry Hill. An indoor market had occupied the site in the interim.

A recent survey rated Dudley as Britain's worst performing medium-sized town, with 29 per cent of its shops lying empty.

But the real telling point is that Dudley is considered to be a 'medium-sized town' – by population it is the second largest town in the country, and clearly punching below its weight.

While the recession and the rise of the internet have taken their toll – Dudley has lost its Woolworths, Thorntons and Dorothy Perkins in recent years – the real damage was done long before that.

On the surface, it is hard to see why Dudley has been in the doldrums for so long. With a population larger than Newcastle, Norwich or Aberdeen, and much lower unemployment than neighbouring towns and cities, it should be able to compete on equal terms.

But the number of people using the town fell by 70 per cent when the Merry Hill centre opened, and Dudley has never really recovered.

Much is made of the town's castle and its medieval heritage, but in many ways this fondness of history also hangs like a millstone around the town's future.

When a developer proposed a £60 million revamp of the town in the late 1980s, one councillor complained it would obstruct the view of the castle.

It is an indication of why Dudley has failed to move with the times like Walsall or Wolverhampton.

One thing is certain, a town with aspirations to become a city – something its population and heritage surely warrants – deserves a better town centre than this.