It has been talked-about for years, the demise of old-fashioned shops where customers can come in and actually touch the goods they want to buy. It turns out, however, that the death of the high street may have been greatly exaggerated.

After a decade of slow and painful decline, bricks-and-mortar shopping is enjoying a renaissance. Retailers are being lured back by cheaper rents, investors are taking advantage of cut-price deals and consumers cooped up during the pandemic are rediscovering their affinity for in-store shopping.

Several chains are in expansion mode, including Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and B&M, the discount stores group. This week Waitrose said that it would spend £1 billion opening 100 new convenience stores. Sosandar, the “Asos for the over-30s”, put its faith in the high street this summer when it revealed plans to open 50 stores, a dramatic shake-up of its business model, given that it has been an online retailer since it was founded in 2016. Mango, Hotel Chocolat, White Stuff and Dunelm are also planning to open new stores.

“I’ve been working in retail for 20-odd years and the death of the store has been foretold probably on an annual basis,” Nick Wilkinson, the chief executive of Dunelm, said. “In each of those years — and probably no more so than during the pandemic, when the shops were closed — everyone was saying, ‘Well, everyone’s now an online-only shopper.’ But we’ve seen just a huge resurgence of stores since the pandemic.”

Ten years ago many retailers went online because it was considered to be a cheaper way of selling their wares and because of growing demand. Yet while warehouse rents have risen sharply since then, rents for units on high streets and in shopping centres have fallen dramatically.

Hammerson, which owns the Bullring in Birmingham, Westquay in Southampton and several other centres, estimates that its rents are a third below their 2017 peak. Data from Avison Young, the commercial property agent, shows that retail rents in places such as Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham have fallen by a fifth, if not more, over the past decade. Even on Oxford Street in central London, rents are 21 per cent cheaper than they were ten years ago.

That has tempted back retailers, which increasingly are moving into larger units. Zara is moving into an old Debenhams store in the Silverburn shopping centre in Glasgow; Primark is upsizing at the Metrocentre in Gateshead; and Frasers Group, Mike Ashley’s retail empire, is opening a new department store in Meadowhall, Sheffield, this autumn.

Many of those units would once have been filled by the likes of BHS or Wilko, big retailers that have gone bust in recent years. Avison Young’s data shows that 85 per cent of Britain’s department stores have closed down over the past decade. But their demise has served to push down rents and to free up sought-after sites. “Consolidation and retailers going bust has meant stores have become available in some prominent locations, allowing retailers to open shops where they wouldn’t have been able to before,” Lesley Males, director of market intelligence at Avison Young, said.

The closure of department stores, which often had large cosmetics floors, has prompted health and beauty companies to try to fill that void on the high street. Boots has opened its first Boots Beauty store in Battersea Power Station, London, while Sephora, the American seller of make-up, has returned to the UK for the first time since 2005.

• The 30-year journey to put Marylebone High Street back on the map

The new shops generally look different to stores from years gone by. They are no longer solely a place in which to sell, but are to be used as brand showrooms and click-and-collect points. Males said that increasingly retailers were trying different things to attract customers. Primark, for example, has introduced cafés and beauty studios in some of its stores, while Gymshark, the sportswear brand, has a gym and juice bar inside its Regent Street store in the capital.

These multiple uses are driving the demand for larger stores, which in turn is one of the reasons why edge-of-town retail parks are proving popular. British Land, the property group, has spent heavily in recent years adding more retail parks to its portfolio because of their growing popularity, with M&S, Frasers and Next among those battling it out for space in those parks.

“All our new stores are two to three times larger than the stores we were opening even two or three years ago,” Angus Thirlwell, the chief executive and co-founder of Hotel Chocolat, said. “We’ve gradually been increasing the size of them and seen that we actually like bigger stores and our customers like them as well.” Stores were “the most effective way” of reaching new customers, even more so than online advertising, he argued.

Even online-only brands, including Sosandar and Gymshark, have seen the value in opening bricks-and-mortar stores. Perhaps they feel compelled to, given that the number of online-only retailers going bust rose to a record high last year, according to Price Bailey, the accountancy firm, which noted that “the pendulum [has swung] back towards bricks-and-mortar retail”.

Further influences include a desire for in-person experiences and retailers beginning to charge for returning purchases made online. Julie Lavington, a co-founder and co-chief executive of Sosandar, said her customers wanted to be able to shop both in-store and online. “We asked them if they wanted us to open shops and virtually 100 per cent of them want us to open shops because they like being able to do both things,” she said. In many of the affluent town centres that Sosandar wants to be in, “there aren’t very many empty shops”.

• Who says shopping centres are dead? This man is betting on a revival

Not everywhere is thriving. Mark Allan, the chief executive of Land Securities, a FTSE 100 property group, has estimated that there is 25 per cent too much retail floorspace in the UK.

Males said some landlords were “redeveloping, repurposing, changing the use [of], or, in some cases demolishing [shop units and malls] that are no longer fit for purpose”.

UBS, the Swiss bank, is ripping down the old TK Maxx store in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and replacing it with laboratory space. In Birkenhead, Wirral council has bought the Grange and Pyramids malls, where it wants to replace some of the retail space with offices, flats and leisure. Sutton Coldfield’s Gracechurch shopping centre has been bought by SAV Group, which plans to turn some of the shops into residential units.

As with rents, the valuations of retail properties have fallen sharply over the past decade. Shopping market values peaked in early 2016, according to MSCI, a finance company, but have plunged by more than 60 per cent since then. The knockdown prices, coupled with their rebounding popularity with both retailers and consumers, have prompted investors to start looking at buying shops and malls again.

Frasers Group and Ashley, its bargain-hunting founder, have been among the most acquisitive over the past couple of years. Last month the company bought the Frenchgate shopping centre in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. That followed the £58 million purchase of the Mall shopping centre in Luton and the £30 million purchase of the Overgate shopping centre in Dundee last year, as well as Junction 32, an outlet centre in Castleford, West Yorkshire. Frasers, which is in talks to buy Fremlin Walk, an outdoor shopping centre in Maidstone, Kent, has said that the deals reflect “its confidence in the future of the UK high street”.