Amazon v the high street – how Doncaster is fighting back

The old pit town lost 5% of its high-street shops last year – but both the council and creative locals are trying to think again Most towns and cities have the strange, uncertain spaces some people call “edgelands”, but Doncaster’s seem to go on for ever. Thanks to the Yorkshire town’s proximity to four motorways, the expanses around it are full of retail parks and distribution centres, those leviathans that sit at the heart of 21st-century consumerism. Three of them belong to Amazon. The two nearest the town centre are comparatively modest, set in a business park that also includes a Morrison’s supermarket and a Holiday Inn Express. But the newest is a breathtakingly vast black-and-silver box covering 1.1m sq ft (102,200 sq metres). On a day when bright sunlight seems to make it glow, driving around its seemingly endless walls proves to be a mesmerising experience, only spoiled by the unshakeable feeling that my little hire car and I are being watched.