High street fashion retailer with 100 stores to close branch as fast food chain plots takeover

The Sun

30-04-2025

A MAJOR fashion retailer, with over 100 stores, is set to close its high street branch for good.
The store will be taken over by a popular fast food chain.
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Shoppers in Norwich were shocked to see signs appear in the window of Yours Clothing on St Stephens Street, confirming the store will soon shut for good.
The posters read: 'Sorry, we are closing down. Your nearest store is Great Yarmouth and we are always open at yoursclothing.co.uk. Thank you for shopping with us, we'll see you soon!'
The move paves the way for chicken chain Pepe's Piri Piri to take over the prime city centre site, after the brand submitted plans to Norwich City Council in March.
The application outlines plans for a new shopfront, updated signage and an extraction canopy - a clear signal that sizzling grills and spicy wraps could be on the way.
If the plans are approved, the new branch would join Pepe's 220-strong army of restaurants across the UK, Ireland, the UAE and Morocco, known for their grilled chicken, wraps and quesadillas.
Despite the planning notice taped to the building's wall, staff at Yours say they've been kept in the dark.
Yours Clothing, which caters to sizes 14 to 40, is owned by AK Retail Holdings, the firm behind other fashion brands like BadRhino and M&Co. It currently runs more than 100 stores across the country.
It's another blow to Britain's high streets, with fashion retailers continuing to feel the squeeze as food outlets muscle in on city centre spaces.
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Locals were quick to hop online and share their disappointment on Facebook.
One user said: "It's so sad to see these stores closing, soon the high street will be empty."
Another shopper said: "I loved that there was a shop for us plus size girlies".
A third added: "So sad, another blow top the British high street."
It comes just weeks after Yours closed its branch in the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham.
Last year, Yours also pulled the shutters down on its branch in the Vicar Lane shopping centre in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.
TROUBLE ON THE HIGH STREET
High street retailers are continuing to shut up shop as shoppers increasingly turn to online alternatives and face mounting economic pressures.
The burden of soaring business rates and rising operational costs has left many stores struggling to survive.
On top of that, inflation has eaten into household budgets, meaning fewer people are heading to the high street to spend.
According to fresh figures from the Centre for Retail Research, a staggering 13,479 stores closed their doors for good in 2024.
That's the equivalent of 37 shutting down every single day.
Independent retailers took the biggest hit, with 11,341 closures, while larger chains accounted for 2,138 shutdowns.
Over half of those closures were linked to insolvency, where businesses were forced to take formal steps to manage mounting debt.
And the trend is far from over, 2025 is already shaping up to be another tough year for bricks-and-mortar shops.
Fashion giant New Look faced a wave of closures following the Government's National Insurance hike in April.
Roughly a quarter of its 364 stores are at risk.
That's around 91 stores and potentially thousands of jobs on the line across its 8,000-strong workforce.
The chain has already slimmed down its store estate significantly, shrinking from around 600 UK outlets in 2018.
It also exited Ireland altogether, closing all 26 of its stores there after more than 20 years of trading.
RETAIL PAIN IN 2025
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury's hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that more than half of companies plan to raise prices by early April.
A survey of more than 4,800 firms found that 55% expect prices to increase in the next three months, up from 39% in a similar poll conducted in the latter half of 2024.
Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: "The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025."
Professor Bamfield has also warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
"By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer's household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020."