The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has seen many high-street retailers either permanently going out of business and shuttering shops or at abandoning their brick-and-mortar locations for an all-virtual existence online to cut costs. This has left many of the UK's high streets with an increasing number of empty retail spaces.
These vacant buildings could get a new lease of life from property company Space Republic, which is proposing to install self-contained, self-cleaning office 'pod' spaces that use ultraviolet light to kill coronavirus in empty shops, helping bring these ghost-town high streets back to life.
Billed as a "safe, private workspace for the work-from-anywhere generation", the sealed work stations, called Pluto work pods, would be put inside defunct high-street chains, pubs, hotels and shopping centres, so that people living locally could walk or cycle to get to them. The business model is that anyone can hire a...