For a number of years, people around Britain have spoken of what they perceived to be "dodgy shops" on their High Street. To many, it seemed new businesses were popping up that had little obvious purpose or, in many cases, a huge number of direct competitors already in situ. Rumours spread between neighbours about money-laundering mini-marts and gang-owned vape stores.
There was a vague feeling of unease about all of this – but it was difficult for ordinary people living nearby to prove there was anything amiss.
And so when we started looking into the topic last February, I didn't truly appreciate the scale of what was really going on on our High Streets.
Our BBC team has travelled across the UK – including to Plymouth, Rochdale, Shrewsbury, Newport and Bradford – exposing what we have found to be brazen criminality on the High Street.
In Hull, we unearthed underground tunnels supplying sacks of illegal cigarettes to High Street mini-marts. In Swansea, we watched as officers smashed in windows of "stash cars" that were used to hide illegal cigarettes during the day, and deal drugs at night. And we exposed a network of high street shops selling illegal tobacco fronted by "ghost directors" masking the real owners.
Freedom of Information requests revealed for the first time that more than 3,600 shops across the UK had illegal goods – such as counterfeit cigarettes, tobaccos, and vapes – seized over 2024-25. The then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described some of our findings as a "disgrace". Throughout our reporting we were repeatedly attacked and threatened.
In lots of places, it seems, High Streets have become a front for organised crime. The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that at least £1bn of criminal cash is laundered through UK High Street stores each year.
"People want to feel safe… [going] down the local High Street," says John Herriman, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. "The concern is that they don't feel as safe as they used to."
Every episode of High Street criminality causes local angst. But when you look at the national picture – as we have done over the last year – another broader lesson emerges. High Streets seem to offer insight into Britain's troubles. Like a cracked mirror, they reflect other trends in British society, including lacklustre income growth, inequality and the boom in online shopping.
And some analysts tell us that obvious criminality on the High Street is shaping politics too, turning voters away from long-established parties and towards political newcomers.
So how did it get to this? And is there a solution for the decline of Britain's High Streets?
Organised crime has always existed on the High Street, says Elijah Glantz, a research fellow into organised crime at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), a security think tank.
"Nail bars, pubs, certain restaurants – anything that's cash-intensive has always been vulnerable to organised crime exploiting it," he says. Criminals like cash because unlike card transactions or bank transfers, it is largely untraceable, which makes it useful for both transactions and money laundering.
But in the last decade, he says, both the police and Trading Standards – a body enforcing consumer protection laws – have been squeezed. In 2002, there were 4,260 staff employed by Trading Standards, but in 2025 there were 2,378. Since then, crime has seemingly become more visible.
"There does seem to be an increase in the visibility of it. We're looking at organised crime that has manifested because nobody has put it away, nobody has forced it underground," says Glantz.
And that brazenness has a sharp psychological effect, analysts say – particularly on politics.
Nick Plumb, a director at the Power to Change think tank, says that the sight of open criminality on the High Street fuels feelings of "powerlessness" – a force that's proving potent in UK politics.
"The sense of a lack of control… has been a key feature of our politics over the last decade," he says. "High Streets are incredibly important [to] how people feel about the country… and politics."
And it's not just criminality that people care about. There is the issue of empty shops too.
In particular, Plumb's analysis showed that in the 2024 general election, support for Reform UK was higher in the 100 places in England with the biggest increases in persistent High Street vacancy relative to the rest of the country. This is based on parliamentary seats they won, or came second in. It built on previous research – from academics at the universities of Warwick and Oxford, and Imperial College London – that linked visible High Street decline to support for the United Kingdom Independence Party, an earlier political outfit of Nigel Farage, between 2009 and 2019.
Plumb says that "High Street decline is only partially explained by deprivation," and points to the "rise of online shopping and out-of-town retail, distant and uninterested ownership [and] changing working habits" as a factors behind the decline.
This decline often starts with those vacant units.
Glantz from Rusi thinks that as legitimate businesses close, crime moves in. "Rents are down, there's a lot of empty spaces, so landlords are willing to pretty much take just about anybody," he says.
Plumb came up with a new name for these areas: the "shuttered front", a string of constituencies with struggling High Streets that Power to Change think could play a pivotal role in future elections.
Indeed, Reform's Nigel Farage and Richard Tice were among the first mainstream politicians to regularly talk about visible signs of High Street criminality.
In 2024, Farage said at an event: "You can see High Streets with five, six, seven barber shops in them." Tice added: "Seriously, how come lots of these new barber shops have got no customers in them? How come they all want cash only? These are fronts for money laundering and drug money, and someone has to talk about it."
And in a social media video he made last year – one that quickly set parts of the internet alight – Robert Jenrick, who was then the shadow justice minister, listed "weird Turkish barber shops" as a visible sign of decline, alongside bike theft, phone theft, and drugs in town centres. "It's all chipping away at society," he said. He later clarified that he was "obviously not talking about all Turkish-style barber shops". Jenrick defected to Reform earlier this year.
Some politicians argue the language around High Street decline is in danger of becoming racially coded. In January, Miatta Fahnbulleh, then the devolution, faith and communities minister, agreed when asked by the Guardian if she thought the focus on Turkish barbers had racist overtones. "Yes, I do. The fundamentals aren't to do with the colour of the skin of people running our High Streets. It's to do with long-term decline and neglect."
At the time a Reform spokesman was quoted as saying: "This is not a matter of ethnicity.
"The National Crime Agency itself has said many of these establishments are used as fronts for money laundering as well as a whole range of criminality which is why they carried out hundreds of raids on them last year."
Meanwhile, immigration – the issue that voters consistently highlight as among the most pressing, and that Reform campaigns heavily on – came up in our investigation too. We exposed a Kurdish gang that was enabling migrants to work illegally in mini-marts the length of Britain, by offering to put their own names to official paperwork. Trading Standards told us they find a constant supply of staff from asylum hotels, who are vulnerable to abuse by employers, working in those shops.
Josh Nicholson, a researcher at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, says, "Chaos and flux in Westminster are reflected in our High Streets.
"People feel powerlessness, they look at Westminster and see an inability of politicians to grapple with the basics and that feeds down to
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