It’s the decade’s first day of British summer time, in a packed pie’n’mash shop in Hackney’s Broadway Market. Under the watchful gaze of a Princess Diana memorial poster, Paul Allen and Polly Cliffton are hosting their monthly pop-up lunch residency Walbrook and Avon, where the jellied eels make way for raspberry bellinis and homemade chilli jam.

When the recession took hold a vogue for all things pop-up truly bubbled over, as the glut of empty shops got put to imaginative re-use and the downturn forced would-be entrepreneurs to come up with new ways of doing business. Pop-ups provide a way for people to pursue their passions on an ad hoc, affordable basis, testing their potential for success without the enormous financial outlays of starting up a complete business. As Polly puts it: “The recession has forced people to re-think. It’s just not so easy to get bank loans and people aren’t so prepared to gamble financially. Pop-ups are a great way to try out ideas in financially difficult times.”

The most significant development in pop-ups has been in the reclamation of boarded-up commercial property. High-street stalwarts like Woolworths have disappeared and it’s been estimated that one-in-six UK shops now lie vacant, with about 1,000 high-street businesses closing every week. This has left a plethora of landlords who are desperate to fill empty properties and a number of agencies have sprung up to help them.

In November 2009 when the Space Makers agency started work at Brixton’s Granville Arcade it was a haunted corridor of empty shops, a dead corner tucked inside the borough’s famously vibrant and thriving market. Now it has been brought back to life and Brixton Village offers the largest, most successful example in the UK of the creative reimagining of space left stagnant by the recession. The 1937 arcade, previously destined to be turned into flats, has now also won recognition as a Grade II listed building.

Julia Shalet leads the Space Makers project at Brixton Village. After site-owners London Associated Properties were persuaded to offer spaces rent-free for an initial three months more than 100 applicants competed for the chance to start a pop-up venture in the old arcade.

Julia is adamant that despite their fleeting nature, pop-ups are far from a temporary fix. Instead by reenergising a forgotten space they can test the potential for long-term trade and investment: “If you showcase what a property can do, you can attract permanent business.” Of the 20 empty shops which once lined Granville Arcade, 13 are now permanently filled with rent-paying tenants, running community-driven businesses and creative projects. Some pop-up spaces are still available on a rolling basis, to those prepared to dive in at seven-days’ notice. This is certainly a challenge, but as many as 25 new entrepreneurs offer their ideas each week, keeping Brixton Village perpetually fresh.

The arcade is now a bright and lively space throughout the week, but on Saturdays it becomes crammed with pop-up performances, exhibitions and events. On Thursdays there’s a bring-your-own-bottle night market with a weekly theme, where visitors can sample food from around the world and try anything from rockabilly dancing to ‘speed hating.’

Pop-ups might seem a natural darling of the chattering classes, but they truly can help to revive local business fortunes at a grass-roots level. Space Makers are very careful not to use the thorny word “regeneration.” Julia makes it plain that the success of the project is down to the long-term dynamism of Brixton and its market: “We’re just drawing on the spirit of something that’s already there.” The market-traders as a whole, not just in Brixton Village, have noticed a bump in profits since the project started.

Keeping money circulating within individual communities has been a key concern of councils attempting to fend-off the recession-and the Brixton Village project relies upon grass-roots collaboration and local trade. But the pop-ups don’t just offer retail therapy. Thursdays and Saturdays at Brixton Village supplement what the shops are offering, turning the once moribund space into a hub where people come not just to buy but to socialise and be entertained. Julia is confident that using pop-ups to bring dead spaces back to life can help local areas through the recession and beyond: “There will always be empty properties and this is about a completely new way of approaching that space.”

Localism and informality have become the buzzwords of the 21st century small-business model. Even global monsters like Starbucks and McDonald’s have been making significant moves to render individual branches more community-specific. Rosie French and Ellie Grace run Salad Club, a pop-up Brixton restaurant which has appeared in the market, where they buy everything they need for their moveable feasts. Ellie happily admitted that it would be wrong to market pop-up restaurants as offering budget dining for the downturn: “As one journalist put it, you could have a cheaper meal at Strada! It’s not as if we offer meal deals and family buckets.” However, the pair do offer lovingly prepared, locally-sourced food for a decent price-an attractive prospect for many middle-class professionals. Indeed, pop-ups seem to offer something for every social strata, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it boutiques the shopping experience of choice for the hype hungry recessionista crowd.

The pop-up business model is valuable in a recession because it can stimulate spending, even when consumer confidence is low, by creating an aura of urgency. Even mainstream high street brands like HMV, which opened 10 temporary shops last Christmas, are using pop-ups in an attempt to grab consumer attention and to test new ideas, products and concepts. Although a retail market populated entirely by pop-ups would clearly be far from ideal, on a localised scale they can provide a refreshing contrast to the predictable chains that can make every British high street, strung with a Boots, a Smiths and a Marks and Spencers, seem exactly the same. Pop-ups are not free of challenges and risks for would-be entrepreneurs and they can’t provide a cure-all for Britain’s ailing high streets. However, a well-executed pop-up project can take a backdrop of instability and morph it into something fresh and exciting. That’s surely something to treasure.