A volunteers' coalition set out to refill Aberdeen's dying Granite Mile

Union Street — Aberdeen's 'Granite Mile', once packed with shoppers from across north-east Scotland — hit rock bottom at the end of 2022: the M&S flagship had gone, empty shops pockmarked the thoroughfare, and Aberdonians had long defected to the shopping centre that opened by the railway station in 2009. After an emergency summit, a community-led coalition, Our Union Street, formed under Bob Keiller, a former FTSE 100 CEO who works unpaid, the BBC reported in September 2026.

The coalition's method was hands-on and unglamorous. It started by listening — thousands of resident submissions — then audited the street unit by unit, tracking down absent landlords and logging what was empty and why; Keiller keeps a wall map of every property in colour-coded Post-it notes.

Volunteers cleaned and painted empty units to make them lettable, spruced the street on a fortnightly rota, and a small team produces social content linked to an Our Aberdeen app. A website collates every available property alongside every financial incentive — council fit-out grants and two-year business-rates discounts — and the coalition works in concert with letting agents, the council, landlords and businesses.

The results are visible: 33 of the 57 units empty in 2023 have been filled, with 14 more in the process of being let — despite 20 further units falling vacant since the effort began. 'The key thing is, we're filling quicker than emptying,' Keiller says. A separate initiative by business group Aberdeen Inspired is tackling the forgotten upper floors, and the city's High Street troubleshooter Iain Nicholson calls Aberdeen's joined-up, sleeves-rolled-up approach something that cannot yet be said of everywhere.

Of 57 empty units in 2023, 33 were filled and 14 more were being let by September 2026 — filling faster than the 20 new vacancies that appeared.

Fractured ownership is the structural enemy — dozens of landlords, sometimes offshore — so the coalition's real product is information: one audit, one map, one website where units and incentives meet.

Perception is treated as infrastructure: volunteer cleaning and repeat repainting are scheduled like maintenance, because a street that visibly fights back stops compounding its own decline.

The council's money (fit-out grants, rates discounts, tens of millions for a food market and seafront) only works when someone walks the street matching landlords, agents and tenants unit by unit.

Vacant retail revives on unglamorous plumbing: audit every unit, track down the absent landlord, list all the incentives in one place, and repaint faster than the graffiti returns.

The city council is pouring tens of millions into making the centre a destination — a £40 million indoor food and drink market funded with the UK Levelling Up Fund, seafront redevelopment, widened pavements — and the former BHS store is becoming its entrance plaza. Nationally, England's new High Street Rental Auctions let councils force year-empty units to market; early adopter Bassetlaw reports 30-plus shops let or under offer.