History
Beginning about 1,000 years ago the word "high" evolved into a term also referring to excellence or superior rank ("high sheriff", "high society"). "High" also applied to roads as they improved; "highway" emerged during the 17th century to replace "high street", and "High Street" began to be used to describe thoroughfares with significant retail areas in villages and towns.
In recent years, although "High Street" is still used to refer to commerce shopping has begun to shift to purpose-built out-of-town shopping centres and supermarkets. However, compared to the United States town and city-centre shopping remains widespread. The town centre in many larger British towns combines a group of outdoor shopping streets (one or more of which may be pedestrianised), with an adjacent indoor shopping centre. The presence of chain stores on High Streets in settlements around the UK is part of the clone town theory, which has among its concerns the loss of "sociability" offered by traditional shopping. "The demise of the small shop would mean that people will not just be disadvantaged in their role as consumers but also as members of communities – the erosion of small shops is viewed as the erosion of the 'social glue' that binds communities together, entrenching social exclusion in the UK."
Read more about this topic: High Street
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)