Walk along Regent Street, take a stroll along a high street or visit almost any shopping mall and the one thing you will see everywhere is new shops.

Brand new shops boasting the latest retail trends; faster, better, shinier than their predecessors. In these supposedly straitened times, this might seem surprising, but it’s quite easy to forget that most UK retailers have been riding the crest of a consumer wave for pretty much a decade, giving them ample time to update their chains and incorporate flexible elements that will keep them looking good for some time to come.

And whether it’s Gap or Gieves & Hawkes, they’ve been doing this through the good offices of this country’s design industry. Pick up the phone to any retailer you can think of and you’ll quickly discover that when the phrase “We did it in-house” is adopted, it’s usually because they don’t want to tell you which consultancy has been used, for fear their competitors will follow suit.

The pool of available agencies that specialise in retail is in fact quite small, so it doesn’t take much digging around to discover who’s behind a new format or interior. But times are changing. This country is, in effect, a design supermarket for the world. Retailers jet in (predominantly, it has to be admitted, to London), visit the design consultancy of their choice and take a look at some of the best shops the Continent has to offer while they’re at it.

They’ve probably asked to be Apple of Albania or maybe the Hamleys of Hungary. And while they may not get entirely what they were looking for, when you look at the strides that have been made in cities such as Istanbul or Delhi, the journeys that have been made appear worth it.

Pick up the phone once more and speak to any of the large design concerns and it becomes apparent that offshore is where their efforts are being concentrated. Most will relate how there is just no money to made from working in the UK at the moment and the flood of overseas clients seeking their talents is taking up all of their time.

All of which means that we may be entering a period when the domestic primacy of in-store design begins to wane. Most of our shops are still better than in most other places, whatever some might say. What we are seeing at the moment is the others strengthening their efforts to catch up.