Tomorrow sees the publication of Stores 2008, a book produced by Retail Week with the support of Land Securities that celebrates the best in retail design across the world during the past 12 months.

And given what’s been happening during that time, you might think that it would be a case of scrabbling around to find the 50 shops that are included in its pages.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Putting the book together turned out to be a first-rate editorial task involving a lengthy process of selection and some pretty tough decisions. And when you look through the result, it’s clear that retailers have not been idle on the store design front.

The most obvious question that follows from all of this is what happens next? Next year will see us put together the third volume and given the present state of the economy, it is tempting to suppose it might end up as a slim volume. And yet anybody who was in Bristol at the end of last week will have been treated to a panoply of new stores, formats and retail design that could just about have filled the book on its own.

Cabot Circus, the development in question, cost about£500 million to build and shows that, despite straitened times, retailers are still prepared to invest in retail environments that push the boundaries of our high streets and equally, that mass market retailing doesn’t have to mean clone Britain.

Almost as adept as Cabot Circus’ new-look stores is the manner in which the Bristol Alliance – aka Land Securities and Hammerson – has gone about creating a coherent destination. We are all familiar with the notion of grouping like-minded retailers together in a scheme – it’s sometimes referred to as clustering. But, more often than not, it amounts to little more than an afterthought as developers scramble to fill empty units.

Not so in Bristol, where the four covered streets that form the approach to the Circus itself have clearly been sculpted in terms of retailer adjacencies. One of the great developer and designer retail clichés is that they are in the business of creating destinations. The middle of Bristol has always been a destination – just not for retail. Hats off to Cabot Circus therefore and let’s hope that the pilot stores that have been put into it are the precursor of better high streets elsewhere.

And if you want a copy of the book, all you need to do is e-mail us – it’s free.

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