Queen Camilla was in Aberdeen this week and it was nice to see her pulling up in a car at the art gallery and greeting the well-wishers. Hang on a minute. Pulling up in a car? At the place you want to be? In the centre of Aberdeen? If you’re a Queen: maybe. Anyone else: absolutely not.

If you don’t believe me, try taking your car into Aberdeen and see what happens. I was up for a wedding not so long ago and casually assumed there’d be somewhere free to park near the hotel on Union Street. Wrong. I eventually found somewhere miles away, in Rosemount. Another recent problem is that tens of thousands of drivers have been caught by the city’s new bus-only lanes, with hundreds of thousands of pounds raised in fines (although it’s not about the money you cynic, it’s about the environment!)

I raise this subject, driving and parking, like a grumpy old man, because it strikes me that it’s profoundly relevant to the news which reached us this week – buried deep, deep down in a press release from Marks and Spencer – that their store just off Union Street is going to close next year. The shop is about 80 years old and is a kind of architectural punctuation mark for Aberdonians, a place everyone knows and, significantly, the last big department store on the city’s main street. So sad news really.

What M&S would prefer us to focus on though is their plan to expand their other big store in Aberdeen, which is part of the nihilistically awful shopping mall Union Square (why did no one listen to George Romero? I ask myself). The expansion there is undoubtedly good news as far as it goes and it’s certainly good for M&S itself, whose peg was looking a bit shoogly not so long ago. Not only is the Union Square shop going to double in size, you can park outside if you want to and sit there with the fan heater on wondering how it all came to this.

If you’re still not sure what I mean, go for a walk on Union Street and tell me what you think. Do you see the empty windows? The graffiti? The weeds hanging down from the top of the buildings like the hair on that woman from The Ring? And in your mind’s eye, can you see the stores that used to be here, or nearby? Frasers. Gone. E&Ms. Gone. Debenhams. Gone. BHS. Gone. John Lewis. Gone. M&S. Going.

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Obviously, the disappearance of these sort of stores is not unique to Aberdeen: many of them have gone because our behaviour changed and people can now shop while munching Wotsits on the sofa instead of heading into town and paying a fortune for a parking place (let it go Mark!) This is just the way things are now I guess, and we should reject the idea that anything resembling the high street of 20 years ago is coming back. It isn’t.

But the situation on Union Street, the entropy of it, its slow death (with the help of stores like M&S moving out) is about much more than the trends we’ve seen nationwide; it’s about a failure of strategic, political and commercial planning that goes back to the 80s at least. Aberdonians will remember the catastrophic mistake of the Bon Accord Centre which effectively cut Union Street off from George Street; to make matters worse, Union Square then opened at the harbour in 2009 and continued to suck the life out of Union Street. Shutters down, to-let signs up, that’s that then.

There have been initiatives – most notably the community-led group Our Union Street which produced a report last year outlining a few of the ways in which the city’s main street could be improved. But it seems to me that they, and the council, are ignoring the actual issues. Like parking, as I said. Why discourage, impede or fine drivers when the public transport is chronic? Businesses in the centre are already saying the new bus gates have affected their takings, so allow free parking. Why ever not? If you make it hard to be in the centre, the centre will suffer.

The other great un-said is that Union Street needs to be different to survive, especially as there is no will to un-do the great mistakes of the life-sucking shopping malls. Unlike the old days, there’s also no alternative retailer that’s ready or able to take on the M&S building. And the other problem is that the closure of Markies removes the only reason some people still go to Union Street (hello Mum). And so the decline continues, and accelerates.

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The answer, obviously, is to rethink Union Street as a residential rather than a commercial place. Many cities around the world (Melbourne for example) have already started to think in this way as a way of tackling the decline of high-street retail, so why not Aberdeen? Perhaps the problem is Aberdonians (God bless ’em) have always been a wee bit slow in picking up on the latest trends. It’s not too late though. We’ve lost M&S, that’s done. But the street itself: not dead yet.