As the market imposes changes on society, society reacts. As individuals see their community disappearing, they turn to extreme solutions. This paper attemps to test these propositions long held by sociologists and political scientists with a newly constituted database of high-street changes. Using fine-grained data on commercial outlets and electoral data measured at a very local level, we document how creation and destruction of shops and commercial businesses affect the popularity of the UK main populist party, UKIP, in local elections. We also study whether different types of outlets (consumer stores vs non-consumer, low-quality vs high-quality, chains vs independent) have distinct effects on the vote share of UKIP. We complement our main findings by an analysis of UKIP entry decision and by using survey data to measure voting intentions at the individual level.