You would not have thought it if you had been on Oxford Street, central London, on Saturday, shoulder-to-shoulder with an army of shoppers taking advantage of a traffic-free day to hunt for bargains, but the high street is bracing itself for yet another week of gloom and doom.

Monthly retail sales figures are expected to show a sixth consecutive fall in trading, for example. British Retail Consortium (BRC) sales figures for November, to be published tomorrow, are expected to reveal a fall of more than 2 per cent from the same time last year as shoppers held off buying until the cut in VAT from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent came in to force at the start of December.

In addition, Woolworths, the most high-profile casualty of the downturn so far, is expected to announce the future of its business later in the week. The closure of many stores is seen as inevitable. Woolworths, a staple of British high streets, launched an up-to-half-price sale last week as administrators sought to dump stock, but it was far from the only store to cut prices. Marks & Spencer held its second 20 per cent reduction day and Debenhams also cut prices by 20 per cent for three days last week.

John Lewis, the department store used as a benchmark for British consumer spending, said yesterday that last week’s sales were down 6.7 per cent on a year earlier. Although that is a marked improvement on the annual decline of about 13 per cent seen in much of November, it is another sign that consumers are not spending as much on Christmas this year. It also follows the implemention of the cut in VAT, which John Lewis brought in three days before it was officially introduced.

Reports at the weekend suggested that a new consortium, led by David Buchler, a company restructuring specialist and former Tottenham Hotspur Football Club executive, has emerged among the bidders for some Woolworths stores. If its move is successful, it is understood that fewer than half of the 815 Woolworths stores will stay open, with about half its 30,000 staff losing their jobs. Mr Buchler was not returning calls last night.

A management team led by Tony Page, the Woolworths trading director, is also interested in buying some or all of the business, as is Ardeshir Naghshineh, the tycoon who is the largest single shareholder in Woolworths.

Several previous bidders, including Theo Paphitis, the Dragon’s Den entrepreneur, have dropped out of negotiations with Deloitte. Tesco, Waitrose and Asda, the supermarket groups, are believed to have bid for a small number of Woolworths’ stores.

Although a temporary boost to sales is expected from the Christmas season — an estimated 1.5 million people visited Oxford Street and Regent Street on Saturday — more high street businesses are expected to follow Woolworths into administration. In the past few months, MFI, Britain’s biggest furniture retailer, The Pier, the high street furniture retailer, and Hardy Amies, former dressmaker to the Queen, have collapsed.

Figures from the CBI last week gave an early indication that sales for November were likely to be down on October and on the same month last year. In October, the value of sales fell 2.2 per cent compared with October 2007 on a like-for-like basis.

Howard Archer, chief economist at HIS Global Insight, the rearcher, said: “It is highly possible that the figures for November will be even worse.”

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