Fly back with me to the Labour Party conference of 2003 and Chancellor Brown's speech. He promised never to “abandon fiscal responsibility or set aside economic discipline”, to “meet and master the next wave of global economic change”, to cut back central bureaucracy and national debt - no, too sad, too cruel, I can't go on.

But after that Gordon Brown said something genuinely interesting: “The town square is more than a marketplace, the city centre more than where people buy and sell... we owe obligations to each other that go beyond calculation, contract and exchange.”

I think that he meant a symbolic town square, because he galloped on to the usual promises about the health service. But now - after years of encouraging overspending, debt, and economic indiscipline - Mr Brown has hundreds of real squares, malls, and high streets to consider.

Woolworth's, MFI, Zavvi, Dolcis, Stead & Simpson, Whittard, The Pier and Ilva are dead; countless others on the verge of oblivion. By the time you read this at least one other familiar name will be gone. Experian predicts that 15 per cent of retail space will soon stand empty, boarded up.

That will make life hard for other traders by depressing the mood of public space: someone is even setting up a “virtual West End” shopping experience online, so you can “click your way down the street” without “beggars, pickpockets or graffiti soiling the pristine online landscape”. To which the only reply is the comedian Jack Dee's great line about the pathos of internet addiction: “Mate, you're not surfing. You're sitting in your bedroom, typing.”

To prevent the nation from such sad cocooning and the streets from being left to gangs and victims, hard practical thought should be put into Life After Shopping.

It is all very well Mr Brown going on about a “test of character”, and a Righteousness of Bishops condemning our obsession with money; hot air will not solve the problem of how to make public space safe, pleasant and conducive to social harmony when the tide of recreational shoppers goes out.

There seems little doubt that it will ebb, for a while at least. I can't say I'm sorry (except for the redundant staff), because it has long been unpleasant to watch the lunatic hobbyism of shopping addicts - and the nastier perversions, such as “de-shopping”, when women openly boast of having used the plastic to buy things they can't afford just for the buzz, taking them back for a refund the next weekend and thus defrauding the shop of administration and packaging.

The hobby has not taken root quite everywhere: in our local electrical shop the owner mused that he hasn't seen a decline in trade this autumn because “round here, people buy things when they need them”. It seems that in rural Suffolk you wait till your vacuum cleaner or your telly breaks before buying a Dyson or a plasma screen. But in the cities, shopping and window-shopping have dominated the new century. Suddenly there is less money and there will be fewer windows; but we'll still want a breath of fresh air. So what do we need?

A gentle revolution, that's what. A whole new way of thinking about the way that we cost, manage, and encourage the life of the streets. Watching a wonderful DVD of Mitchell and Kenyon films from 1901-1906, Electric Edwardians, I was struck by the way that even the poorest people enjoyed being out promenading and people-watching, waving at cameras, milling about, watching small events such as the Band of Hope procession or the Leeds Athletic and Cycling Club carnival. It brought to mind the continental habit of the passeggiata, the cheerful evening promenade of families and neighbours - who may stop for a coffee or a fino, but not particularly to shop.

We have lost this: too often our town centres stand miserably empty once the shops shut at six, only to wake into youthful mayhem four hours later when the drinking clubs get going . Yet given an excuse Britain still gathers in amiable throngs: think of the Jubilee, the crowds round big screens for football or concerts and the enthusiasm for provincial street fairs.

Think of markets, where there is indeed buying and selling but on a cheap and daily scale (and think too how threatened and harassed those markets are - even the famous Borough Market in London). People like to get out and mill around, to run into people they know or flirt momentarily with strangers. And crowds are far safer than lonely tumbleweed streets of boarded shops.

That instinct to walk down handsome streets looking around you has been more or less hijacked in recent years by the shopping compulsion. Now that money is tight and shops closing, what should government do? It has to do something, if anyone is serious about this “wellbeing” agenda that we used to hear so much about before the banks went up the Swanee.

It should promote the non-shopping life: galleries and museums, leisure centres and playing fields, parks and libraries. Councils should be encouraged to get empty shops used by community groups, at hugely reduced or zero business rates, even if it is for a short contract. If a high street space is going to stand empty and forlorn, why not let a good youth group use it to teach musical skills or play indoor games? Indeed, why just youth groups? Imagine the dividend in a few years' time if some of those redundant shopworkers found that they could cheaply spend their period of unemployment in the barn-like shell of a former Woolworths, learning a new IT, craft, art or musical skill from some equally redundant expert, in the process meeting old and young in their own community, and co-operating on the rota to run the door, the admin and the cleaning?

Less radically, quadruple the number of park wardens so that outdoor space is safe, fill the bandstands with those tyro musicians and the grass with subsidised keep-fit and games leaders. Deploy the more educated jobseekers to help out in libraries, directing people to interesting research or reading and helping them use the computers.

Encourage a daily soapbox storytelling session where some former banker relates his hilarious stories of falling foul of Japanese protocol, and former shopworkers let off steam in doggerel verse about awful customers. Positively encourage buskers and street theatre of all kinds. If small traders can't afford premises any more, allow the proliferation of colourful barrows. Make a bonfire of the sillier regulations that stop people singing and performing and teaching without red tape.

Make Britain fun. Give those CCTV cameras something cheerful to look at. Why not?

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