I’m standing outside a lift in a department store in Newport, Wales, looking at the sign, wondering where to go. Stay on the ground floor for shoes, giftware and presents, ladies’ accessories and Estée Lauder? Or up to the first floor for furniture and ladies’ fashions – Annabelle, Tigi-Wear, Autonomy? It’s the second floor for cookshop and homeware. Lingerie is on three, plus Alfred’s coffee shop and tea room. Maybe I’ll go straight there for a cappuccino and a ponder …

But nothing happens when I press the button. The panel is hanging from the wall by its wires and doesn’t look safe. I’d be nervous about stepping into this lift. Plus, it’s dark. I’m using the torch on my phone to read the sign. There’s no giftware on this floor, no presents, no cosmetics counter. Once, this floor would have smelled of perfume; now, it’s musty, cold and empty. Because, on 19 January 2019, after 144 years of trading, this department store, Wildings, closed its doors for ever.

The windows – once famous for their displays, especially at Christmas – are boarded up, but there’s light coming into the building from the upper floors. I find the stairs and climb gingerly to the first floor. It’s the same story here. No Annabelle or Tigi-Wear, instead a discarded tent; even the person who once slept here has gone. There’s also a massive pile of plastic jerry cans and, hanging from the ceiling and walls, the remains of what look like makeshift ventilation ducts – evidence of another more recent, less illustrious chapter in the building’s story, when it was used as a cannabis farm. But we’ll get to that.

It’s hard to imagine this dank, eerie space in its pomp. So I call Peter James, who was the managing director until he took the difficult decision to close down seven years ago. Wildings has played a big part in James’s life. He took over the job from his father, Sheldon James, and has fond memories of it all the way back to his childhood in the 60s. “Department store retail was theatre and it was glamorous in those days,” says James, 65, from his home in Bristol. “It was more about service than constant sales. It was very traditional, otherworldly, atmospheric; there were a lot of fashion shows.”

Today, retail workers are predominantly female, but the workforce was even more so after the second world war. In the 1970s and 80s, there were between 50 and 60 staff members at Wildings. “A lot of glamorous women never found husbands, so Wildings was their life and family,” says James. He particularly remembers Miss White, who joined as a junior secretary in 1942. “A lot of makeup, black mascara, big glasses, beehive hair. She was quite a private person, but formidable. My father had to gently remind her that he was the managing director, not her.”

Sheldon James would leave for work at seven each morning, then drive back home for lunch at 12.30pm. Sometimes, father and son would travel back to the store together in the afternoon. James would go up to a room at the top of the building. “We used to have ladies making dresses and doing alterations,” he says. “That’s where I revised for both my O-levels and A-levels. Quite successfully, I might add!”

After university, James went to London, where he worked in the city as a management consultant, specialising in retail. In 1995, at 35, he returned to Newport to take over from his dad. Miss White was still there. She didn’t retire until 2007, more than 60 years after she joined.

Unwelcome guests

I’ve been let into the building by Mo and Naj, who are from Kabul and Helmand respectively and live in Newport. They work in the shop next door, Danny Homeware. Their boss, who is also from Afghanistan but lives in London, bought the Wildings building at 165 Commercial Street at the end of 2024.

Mo and Naj were involved in clearing out the building last year. It was a massive job – skipload after skipload, they say. It wasn’t stuff from its department store days, but from a more recent incarnation.

In October 2023, after reports of suspicious activity, officers from Gwent police raided the building and discovered more than 3,000 cannabis plants, at different stages of maturity, growing over three floors. The crop was estimated to be worth more than £2m. “A lot of people thought I was doing it to pep up my pension,” jokes James. “It would have been a good idea; I wish I’d thought of it.” But he had sold the building for £230,000 three years earlier. He doesn’t know who bought it at auction, but in that time Wildings went from a venerable but fading department store to a multistorey cannabis farm.

When the police raided Wildings, they found two Albanian men, Adrian Daja and Andi Shabani, who had been living there among the crop. In January 2024, Daja and Shabani admitted producing a controlled class B drug and received two-year prison sentences.

The bust was captured by a BBC camera crew and featured on an episode of Rookie Cops. As well as the forest of cannabis, you can see all the equipment – lighting, pumps and ventilation – that Mo and Naj had to remove later. There were also bags and bags of compost, which were donated to nearby allotments. All the empty jerry cans downstairs, still to be disposed of, once contained liquid nutrients for hydroponic irrigation, which doesn’t require soil. It seems the growers were experimenting with different methods of cultivation.

I’m on the third floor, where there is a big puddle on the floor, presumably from a leaky roof. Ceiling panels hang down. There is also what looks like a giant chrysalis made out of brown packing tape. It’s soft on the outside, but heavy when you push it … a makeshift punchbag! There’s a pull-up bar, too. In a corner, sheets of cladding have been ripped from the walls and made into a U-shaped ramp. It looks like a half-pipe in a skate park.

That’s exactly what it is, Naj says. He assumed it was the work of the resident cannabis farmers – that perhaps they had passed the time skateboarding and exercising while waiting for their indoor jungle to grow. But the evidence suggests this activity was more recent. On the wall – scrawled with a marker pen – is an account of the ramp’s construction:

17/3/25–19/3/25 CLEANING UP THE ROOM

22/3/25 TUCK SHit OFF WINDOWS

23/3/25 WE SK8TED IN HERE TODAY

25/3/25 WE StARtED THE FRAME OF THE RAMP

28/3/25 FiRST RAMP DONE TODAY (WE BOtH SK8TED IT!!!)

And it goes on. Over the next three months, according to the writing on the wall, they added a rail, a quarter-pipe and a fun box, and brought in a bike, too. Who were these urban explorers? The word “GHOST” is written a lot, also “SHADOW” and “THE WILDINGS WANDERERS”. There are drawings of bongs and spliffs; I’m guessing cannabis may have been involved again. But all the dates are from last year, long after the farm was raided and Daja and Shabani were sentenced. It seems there was another chapter of Wildings, when this floor that was once home to lingerie and Alfred’s tea room became a secret fun park.

I make my way to the final section of the store, up a flight of stairs, to the three offices at the front of the building. They look down over Commercial Street, the city’s main shopping street, which was pedestrianised in 1978. In one of the offices, possibly the one where Peter used to do his homework, a year planner from 2016 hangs on the wall. On a filing cabinet in the corner is a framed black-and-white photograph of a dapper chap with a moustache and a pocket square. I later learn it is Fred Wilding, Sheldon James’s predecessor and the son of Alfred Wilding, who started the business in 1874.

Next to the photograph is a cigarette lighter and a plastic bottle containing a yellow liquid that looks worryingly like urine. Who left it here? Weed farmers? Wildings wanderers? We’ll never know, but the scene encapsulates not just the story and journey of this building, but also the street outside – and dozens of British high streets.

Decline and fall

When James took over Wildings in 1995, the store was doing well. It had always been the place to go for school uniforms and trade in the area was good. The Christmas displays on the balcony over the entrance were a big event in Newport’s festive calendar. “It was a viable business, pre-online, and Newport was still a very busy town centre,” says James.

The department store’s biggest trading year was 2004. Then sales began to fall. James cites several reasons. While more and more people were using the internet, he says this didn’t have a significant effect on high street sales until about 2014. At first, the main issue was parking. Some of the city-centre car parks shut down and shoppers couldn’t be bothered to go to the multistorey if they were just popping into town. Retail parks, which were easy to reach and had plenty of parking, popped up on the outskirts of the city and in nearby Cwmbran.

Given the growth of Amazon and other online retailers since then, I’m surprised to learn that most retail in Great Britain – about 72% – still goes through bricks-and-mortar shops. But James says: “When you lose such a big market share, it makes it so hard to make it economically viable. The percentage that’s gone online, that was your profit – and that’s now gone.” The department store format in particular has suffered – not so much Selfridges and John Lewis, but smaller family stores such as Wildings, which have to take on all the overheads themselves.

Guardian analysis of Ordnance Survey and Landmark Information data this year showed that there were at least 8,000 fewer retail outlets in Great Britain in 2025 than there were in 2019. The biggest drop, down 38%, was department stores. Research published in January by the University of Southampton warned that Labour will be “washed away in a tide of discontent” at the next general election unless it tackles high street decline, which voters see as a priority. Meanwhile, a report last May from the thinktank Power to Change found that support for Reform UK was growing in areas with the highest rates of persistent retail vacancies.

Newport has been hit especially hard. In 2022, the thinktank Centre for Cities found that it had the most empty shops in the UK by area, with 33% of the city centre vacant, partly as a result of Covid. By 2025, the figure had dropped to 19% – still double that of London or Cambridge. When Marks & Spencer closed its branch on Commercial Street in 2013, it was “the final nail in the coffin for Newport as a trading centre”, says James.

He’s nostalgic for the Newport of old. It was “a bustling town centre with lots of interesting shops. And it was a nice size – you used to see your mates, relations, people you knew. And you could look up at the beautiful Victorian architecture, including our shop. It makes me very sad that Newport seems to have gone to such an extreme of dystopia.”

Faded glamour

I emerge from the dark and stand outside Wildings. The marble facade has been boarded up. Over the makeshift door, an extra piece of plywood has been screwed on, presumably to reinforce security. It looks as if the original door was kicked in – maybe by a cannabis farmer or a Wildings wanderer.

I’ve arranged to meet someone I first encountered on a Facebook group called Newport Memories Past. Mark Vrettos was born in the city in 1960. His great-great-grandfather was Greek, from the island of Ithaca. He worked on a ship, which docked here; he met a local girl, stayed and opened a cafe, which he called the Odysseus (of course). This may feel like a sidetrack, but there is a point: Newport has always been a place of immigrants. “The first were the Romans, when they settled here 2,000 years ago,” says Vrettos.

Wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with “Make Newport Great Again”, Vrettos begins our tour at the northern end of Commercial Street, outside the Westgate hotel, which in 1839 was the scene of an armed rebellion by the Chartists. Once Newport’s smartest hotel, the building has been empty since the early 2000s and its recent restoration as a cultural venue was halted by the owner. Vegetation (seemingly indigenous rather than illegal) sprouts from the roof of the ornate porch.

Continuing along Commercial Street, we pass many boarded-up shops. One of them used to be a recruitment agency. “But I think the problem was there are so few jobs here, so there wasn’t much work for them,” says Vrettos. He points out what used to be a WH Smith (“I used to love going in there to buy all my magazines”), Ratners the jewellers and a pub, the Hornblower.

Everything he highlights is in the past tense – what used to be. So what’s left? There are charity shops, although even some of these have closed down, says Vrettos. The barbers and hairdressers are still going, as are the tattoo shops and several vape shops (although 19 of them in Newport were shut down in the nine months to August 2025 for selling illegal cigarettes and tobacco, according to the BBC).

Vrettos says he is not as down on the city as some. Locals are often quick to disparage it, he says, but that is because they’re measuring it against the past, rather than elsewhere. “They don’t have a yardstick to compare it with. If they went to some of these other towns, they’d realise it isn’t so bad.” He mentions a couple of places in the West Midlands where he has spent time.

True, it’s not bustling, as it was in his youth, but on a dreary winter Wednesday there are a few people out and about. There’s still a Boots, an Iceland, a Waterstones and a bank – and I can see human cashiers inside.

And Newport has something else, immediately striking to the visitor, that even retail apocalypse can’t take away. If it’s a tale of two cities – one now and one in the past – there’s also a divide between ground level and everything from the first floor up. Down here are the boarded-up windows and graffiti. Up there, it’s a treat of Victorian architecture and handsome facades.

We make our way back to the Wildings building. The department store was the poshest place in town to shop, says Vrettos. He used to come here with his mum to buy his school uniform. “As soon as you walked through the door – boof, it hit you, the smell of all the fragrances.” And, of course, he remembers the Christmas displays. The last time he came here was for a tin opener, he thinks. That’ll have been in homeware and cookware on two.

I call James again. What future is there for department stores like Wildings, for Newport city centre and for other high streets? In answer to the first question, he’s not hopeful. An independent department store in 2026 is “not economically viable unless you happen to be in a very successful trading city”. In fact, James now runs a small department store in Bath. “It’s a lot of hard work for a slim return, even if it works,” he says.

What does Bath have that Newport doesn’t? “The demographic is wealthier, so spending power is greater,” he says. “All the brands – and interesting independents – want to be trading there, so it creates a retail mix in the town centre. Also, there are nice restaurants and you all support each other. Success breeds success. And, of course, places like York and Bath have the history and are architecturally beautiful places.”

So is Newport, I say. “Newport is a place with great architectural integrity,” he says quickly. “But they haven’t got the other factors.” In other words, not all high streets are dead, just most of them. The ones that survive tend to be in prettier, more affluent towns. So what is the solution for places such as Newport? “Accept that there is going to be limited demand for retail space and encourage residential developments, even if you need to subsidise it a bit,” says James.

This, as it happens, is the plan for the old Wildings building. Mo’s and Naj’s boss didn’t want to speak to me for this article, but they tell me the idea is to have a retail unit on the ground floor and 20 flats above it.

Now, though, Mo and Naj are needed at Danny Homeware, as there’s a well-known shoplifter on the prowl. The makeshift plywood door is pulled shut and secured with a big padlock, to keep out the skateboarders and cannabis farmers. The memories – of service, of theatre, of Miss White’s big glasses and beehive – are locked away inside.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.