Can Dubai learn anything from the nation of shopkeepers?

The mood on the British high street is funereal. Literally so for Dignity, the UK’s biggest undertaker.

Even the funeral service has slashed its prices by 25 percent. But hurry, the offer must end soon.

On Chiswick High Street, home to the London bureau of Arab News, shops are closing by the month. The profit warnings pile up like end-of-season clearance stock.

Toys R Us and the electronics retailer Maplin are already in administration, while fashion outlet New Look and flooring chain Carpetright have closed more than 150 shops.

The Chiswick Blockbuster store, (yes, remember them) remains vacant from almost a decade ago.

With the average house in the area worth more than £1 million, we shouldn’t really mourn for the good people of Chiswick.

Things will only get ugly if the upmarket Waitrose supermarket closes and the strategic reserve of roast cauliflower steaks seasoned with crushed hazelnut and saffron runs low.

Chiswick is a shop window on digital disruption in the global retail industry. Even here, in downtown double-income luvvie land, the retailers are either struggling or have given up the struggle.

Leading figures from the shopping industry are in Madrid this week at the World Retail Congress, pondering the existential questions faced by the nation of shopkeepers in the era of Amazon and Alibaba.

The gathering is all about how the industry can remain relevant or, indeed, upright amid the online onslaught.

Dubai announced plans to support the under-pressure industry last week as part of a wider push to lift the spirits of the economy.

Sean Cronin

Some of the big Gulf retail groups are in Madrid, too. For them the stakes are especially high. Many property developers, stung by the fallout from the collapse of house prices a decade ago, have sought to reduce their reliance on the boom-bust residential property cycle and, instead, build recurring revenues from the retail sector. But the shift has not proved to be the panacea that many hoped.

The regional property industry is suffering, in part, because the supply fails to match demand. House builders are selling oysters to people who want to buy fish and chips. Retail risks making the same mistake.

The shift from bricks to clicks has been harsh for the UK high street, and now increasingly so for the Dubai Mall.

Dubai announced plans to support the under-pressure industry last week as part of a wider push to lift the spirits of the economy. It was a clear acknowledgement that retailers need help.

But don’t write off the high street just yet.

A few miles down the road from leafy Chiswick is the thriving old school retail smorgasbord of Hounslow High Street — a kind of Bond Street for the modern British zero-hour contract economy.

Hounslow High Street has not one, but two Greggs, the budget sandwich and snack seller — unloved by the millennial calorie counter, but embraced by those of a certain age who like their bread buttered.

You can buy a doughnut in the first and waddle happily to the second, before shaking the crumbs from your stubble and refueling with a cheese and onion pastry puff, perhaps pausing to reflect on the “meal deal” option with crisps and coke.

It is the kind of retail guilty pleasure that will always be beyond the jab of Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos, however mighty their punch.

On Hounslow High Street, you will pass pound shops and pawnbrokers, suitcase sellers and money transfer booths, fried chicken outlets and kebab shops, all doing a roaring trade amid the soothing occasional lilt of shop lifter-triggered burglar alarms.

Hounslow is a cholesterol-clogged retail artery that defies digital disruption because it knows its market. The Amazon and Alibaba buses have not yet rolled into this corner of West London beneath the roar of the Heathrow flight paths.

If they did, they might find their wheel hubs resting on bricks.

Hounslow proves there is still a place for old school retail — even amid the scarily effective advance of artificial intelligence, automation and digital marketing.

Madrid may hold some of the answers to the existential questions facing the global retail industry this week. But if you’re shopping for survival tips, visit Hounslow instead.