This Youth Voice column is written by Lily Phillips, 14, a pupil at Archway School.

Farewell to Select at Merrywalks.

At Select you could get nice clothes cheaply. It shall be missed and Merrywalks looks different without it.

Then again, at the moment Merrywalks is looking fairly different anyway.

Bramleys shut a while back. Tragically, Pink Planet also shut as did Roman.

The empty store fronts are making Merrywalks seem a little sleepier.

Although sometimes Stroud can seem its own little world, stores disappearing is not unique to our little corner of the world.

In fact, UK high streets are reaching crisis point as the market place quite literally closes.

English and Welsh town centres have lost eight per cent of their shops on average since 2013, according to a Guardian analysis.

Clothing retailers have seen the biggest decline since 2013, with more than 750 shops lost, which is bad news for the 383,000 people employed in British clothing and footwear stores.

The simple fact is that everyone shops online these days, and the UK just doesn’t have any money in 2019.

Many young people in Stroud will remember summer holidays as a kid when you went to Pink Planet to ‘pick a movie’ and spent the whole time playing with those weird little toys.

Merrywalks quite literally connects the buses to the high street and is the ultimate home of all things cheap. At the moment it seems like Merrywalks is disappearing, and with it the bones of Stroud.

If New Look ever shut, where would Year 7 girls hang out at the weekend?

Despite the sad fading of our childhood, there is a silver lining as Merrywalks undergoes a major redevelopment.

This new cosmopolitan paradise is to be called Five Valleys as selected by primary school children.

Stroud is going up in the world and often makes the list of the best places to live in Britain.

So yeah, Merrywalks – or should I say the Five Valleys – is evolving.

In the long run I am sure it will be for the good of Stroud but still, seeing the old Merrywalks fade away is a sad memorial to the scruffy yet lovable town we all knew so well.