The John Lewis Partnership has today announced that the store at the Vangarde Shopping Park will not reopen when lockdown lifts, along with another seven stores across the country.

A spokesman said all of these shops were 'financially challenged prior to the pandemic', and the significant shift to online shopping in recent years led them to believe the performance of these stores could not be 'substantially improved'.

However, Phil Pinder, head of York Retail Forum, criticised the decision to close John Lewis.

"It is ludicrous to close stores based on the shopping habits of last year. I think John Lewis will come to regret how quickly they are closing down their store estate," he told The Press.

"They were profitable before, so to say they were struggling is a little bit naive. Yes, they probably have had very high rents for the year we have had but I think there were possibly better ways than to close and never reopen.

"For York, it casts more light on the Vangarde development and the Community Stadium complex and hopefully it's not the beginning of the end for people trading there.

"Other big retailers we know are already looking at their store estates; it would be very worrying if we see some of those close as well.

"It's obviously sad for people who work there. Hopefully some will be redeployed to Waitrose and to Leeds."

Phil also raised the question of which retailer would take on the store which opened in April 2014 and has a large selling space of 83,000 sq ft.

"Who's going to fill that gap now? It's a very big site. It won't break up into smaller stores and there's nobody looking for stores with that space at the moment. It's a real worry.

"It's too big for B&M, for example, which have taken other big stores which have closed and we already have two B&Ms in York already, so a third would be unlikely."