The end of Debenhams in the high street

Psychedelic Casual said:
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 to come in centrally to shop for the day and then disperse back out again. They are where a lot of people live now compared to decades ago. 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!
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As with all towns, the real driver of the micro economy is getting people to actually work in them. No amount of fancy signs, flower pots and street furniture has much real affect.
 
The building in Edinburgh Princes Street is owned by Legal and General and they are going to turn it into a hotel and restaurants on higher floors and some smaller boutique type shops on lower
 
hilts said:
True but irrelevant to the point unless the conversation went along the lines of

“ what style of building do we think will look rather attractive”

“ give a fuck as long as he looks better than a rat hanging around a bin”

Like the Lego place near the airport or the houses around city’s ground and now this red rock eyesore it won’t be long before people are saying “wtf were they thinking when they built that shite”
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Beauty is within the eye if the beholder i guess
 
hilts said:
Stockport fucked up building over the river and some of those office buildings fuck me they’re ugly. You are right about underbank though. Whoever designed that red rock monstrosity wants shooting though.
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Unfortunately, our post-war boom decades coincided with the worst architecture in the history of mankind.

Town centres were terribly planned, we knocked down some belting buildings and interesting streetscapes, and replaced them with eyesores whose architecture was fashionable for a few years and has not aged well at all.

Same with inner-ring roads, cutting off city/town centres from its closest neighbourhoods, and it was the same with inner-city housing too with its letterbox windows and lack of character.

Hopefully, in the coming decades this can be rectified. Architecture has taken a big leap forward in the last decade, after decades of shite (even that 90s-00s style of city centre apartments that shot up all over the country - red brick with grey panels and small balconies - just awful!.. and these are the ones in the news with cladding issues that might be passed on to the mortgage holders of the apartments and not the building companies that built them!).

[Apologies for taking this thread away from Debenhams]
 
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marcus said:
Beauty is within the eye if the beholder i guess
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It is mate I like cities like Budapest prague Bruges that kind of thing. Wherever I go I prefer the old town look. I don't mind new if it's kept separate. It's when they turn into mongrels that it takes the beauty away.
 
hilts said:
It is mate I like cities like Budapest prague Bruges that kind of thing. Wherever I go I prefer the old town look. I don't mind new if it's kept separate. It's when they turn into mongrels that it takes the beauty away.
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I do totally. Im just not sure how they couldve made a cinema look appealing stockports a mess thats why id concentrate on underbank/market
It could be amazing

fuck knows with mersey way , just had the idea of a cheshire oaks style sort of thing
 
marcus said:
I have an idea what stockport town centre should look like.

it has merseyway and underbank

mersey way is an ageing eyesore that declines year on year. Past decade has seen m&s, woolies and BHS shut and now debs.

underbank and market place is beautiful rich in history.

so... clear the centre of mersey way for parking , convert buildings into a more ‘out of town’ shopping centre , like a peel centre sort of thing. Add affordable housing, flats etc above,

And make underbank/market the town centre, as it once was

costs would probs be prohibitive, but only a tjouggt
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Some great pubs and food etc around the market and underbank area in Stockport. If, as has been mooted, town and city centres become more leisure oriented destinations rather than bricks and mortar retail, then your suggestions have a lot of merit.
Already seeing the start of this move in King Street in town
 
Just think of all those empty retail buildings & pubs that can be turned into flats/houses , someone’s going to make a lot of money
 
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