Do you think town/city centres will just change forever now ? Mixture of pandemic and changing behaviour.
village i live in is thriving and with more people working from home in the future maybe ‘local’ will thrive more and ‘town’ decline further.
i cant say owt, yesterday my work watch broke. Ordered new on line be here today.
can see my village going down the cafe culture/local quirky shop route each year.
wont work for every village
If local village and satellite town centres see a boost in their economy, then city centres should still be able to thrive as well but in a different way to before.
City centres are no longer just central shopping districts for big department stores, where the wider conurbation come in centrally to shop for the day and then disperse back out again. They’re now places where people choose to live. Manchester city centre’s population was 500 in 1990 and is set to hit 100,000 by 2025. It’s grown 35,000 in the last four years alone. The city centre will overtake Wythenshawe as the borough’s largest population district and will have a population of its own that’s around 35% of the entire population of Stockport.
I would think that there’s going to be a surge in businesses opening up to cater for all these people, even with the pandemic, not a decrease.
But the big archaic department stores that attracted the wider population to the city centre aren’t necessarily what will remain open for them. It will be the smaller businesses, much like your local village centre, because city centres now have their own villages within them. Local and small businesses should be able to spring up and despite the demise of the archaic big department stores.
I’d also expect to see places like Manchester keep on enticing businesses to relocate from the much more expensive London and set up here. Especially because of the pandemic. So while a department store may close, the building it’s in or at least the site of the building it’s in can be converted or rebuilt into offices to accommodate businesses that have moved North and need office space.
Until recently, Manchester was never a place for big businesses to really reside in the city centre. All of our big and tall buildings have been residential. But that might change
Google, Amazon, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, LLP, and Microsoft have all opened offices in Manchester. Amazon are looking at making Manchester a campus for itself, larger even than its new Hanover Building office that it has acquired already.
Manchester is the fastest growing tech city in Europe. Tech Nation Report saw an increase of investment in Manchester from £48m in 2018 to £181m in 2019. Emerging tech, research, cyber security, AI and digital infrastructure are the big movers at the moment, with tech increasing six times the rate of the rest of the UK economy. And Manchester is the hub.
Even our local businesses have grown into powerhouses: AO, Co-Op, Missguided, MusicMagpie, On the Beach, Push Doctor, The Hut Group, and BooHoo. As these businesses grow, their demand for office space will too.
All of these companies will have more people working for them and many will live in and around the city centre, and they will drive the growth of the businesses needed to cater for them.
I’d actually predict that the state of the city centre will improve rather than decline over the coming decade, despite the big department stores folding.
And let’s hope the plan for Piccadilly Gardens is miles better than what’s there now!
