Finally Broadmarsh: The £500 million game-changer

I was sitting in the office early last week looking over some sprawling indicative drawings for the wholesale rebuilding of a massive part of Nottingham. And it’s a big deal.

The drawings sketch out the detail of a £500 million retail scheme ranged across three levels which could not only put Nottingham beyond the reach of its regional rivals, but also rid the city of the out-dated eyesore that is its southern approach.

So what was my reaction? One of deja vu.

The story of the redevelopment of Broadmarsh is a modern-day parable about the relationships between big cities and big developers and shopping centres and the economy.

I first saw photos, drawings and CGIs of the redevelopment of Broadmarsh in the early noughties. Even then, redevelopment was long overdue, with the centre which defines the boundary between the city centre and its southern approach looking every inch the 1960s Arndale dinosaur it really is.

As time went by, the amount Westfield said they were going to spend on the redevelopment slowly rose. But so did the sense that it wasn’t their top priority. Nottingham City Council bent over backwards to try to make sure it remained a priority. Indeed, some critics would point to the strange decision to rid Lister Gate of what looked like perfectly healthy trees. Chopping them down opened up a nice sightline to a re-clad Broadmarsh entrance, but was there really anything wrong with the trees? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that while Nottingham City Council tried to keep what had become a £700m scheme alive, Westfield promptly went and spent a load of money in Derby.

The Australian developer has a long-established reputation for taking a robust attitude to business, but this decision went down very badly in Nottingham – on two fronts.

With the arrival in the City Council’s planning department of Jennifer Dearing, an experienced outside consultant brought in to give some backbone to a drifting planning department, Nottingham’s attitude to Westfield hardened.

More than once, I heard senior figures in the city say that if all Westfield had to offer was a bigger version of the curtain-walled giant they built in Derby, then Nottingham was no longer interested.

It didn’t stop there. The city took the advice of some senior national figures in architecture and urban development and decided that, whatever happened, the plans Westfield had sketched out to the council all those years ago were dead. Whether it was Westfield or someone else, a new approach was needed – one which would use large-scale retail redevelopment to solve an ageing blot on the landscape.

The credit crunch effectively killed off Westfield’s original plan. No one was going to throw £700m at a large scale shopping development when retailers were being deserted by consumers suffering from badly-bruised credit cards.

But none of this changed the fact that Nottingham is Britain’s fifth biggest shopping city and the centre of the East Midlands’ catchment. It may have bled some people to Leicester (which now has a John Lewis as well), but Derby hasn’t got the high-end retail brands to challenge. Neither is as big.

So now, finally, we have a new plan - all £500 million and 5,000 jobs worth of it.

Going back to my initial point, I have to admit that I haven’t seen it all before in the design sense. The drawings I pored over last week show a scheme that has changed drastically. Instead of a monstrous, old-fashioned mall, Westfield has now agreed to produce a series of smaller buildings which will open up new street scenes, and rid one of England’s eight most important cities of a Berlin Wall of a centre which shouts regional mediocrity at anyone walking in from the railway station.

It could lead to Nottingham getting something genuinely different – a new generation of shopping centre which doesn’t stand out like some monstrous blob. One with streets to wander through and an open air atmosphere, one with views of the city it is part of.

So it’s wrong to be churlish about this plan. If it proceeds the way Westfield are suggesting then it could change the face of the city for the better while bringing in 5,000 jobs.

The knock-on impact of its construction will be considerable: a project of this scale will have an economic multiplier during and after construction through the jobs it creates and the money spent during building and the likelihood that – if it brings in new names – it will bring in new visitors.

Those new names should, finally, include Harvey Nichols, with whom Westfield has an informal agreement.

It may also add to the logic behind investment in redevelopment of the railway station and expansion of the tram

In short, a project of this size has the potential to give the city’s economy a noticeable tick-up.
A scheme on this scale does not come without its question marks. What will happen to other parts of the city’s retail core when Broadmarsh opens? And what impact will it have on the Victoria Centre (which has expansion plans of its own)? How will we cope with radical revisions to the city’s road network implied by this plan?
The biggest question of all is the oldest question of all. After all these years, is Westfield finally going to come good on its promise?

A retail numbers game deciphered

Taken at first glance, the Local Data Company’s assessment of Nottingham’s retail health seemed pretty dire.
Here was one of the top retail destinations in the UK, and nearly a quarter of its shops were standing empty.
I know credit crunch and recession have been bad, but how on earth did that happen?
Well, I’m not sure it did.
We got hold of LDC’s data more than a week ago, but it has taken me several days to get to the bottom of the methodology underneath its shocking headline. On that basis, I decided not to proceed with a story based on the headline statistics alone because something about the numbers didn’t ring true.
So, how did LDC arrive at a figure which says that 23.6 per cent of Nottingham’s shops are standing empty?
Here are the answers. First of all, LDC didn’t do a specific survey about shop vacancies. It is a business which specialises in compiling data about property occupation in its widest form, which it then supplies in whole or part to clients which range from Google to Yell to Experian. They use it as the basis for their own socio-economic analysis and advice on targeting service or products.
So the LDC Shop Vacancy report is actually an analysis of only part of a wider set of data.
Crucially, there are also two other key differences between this and an examination of how many shop units are empty or occupied in what we might understand as Shoppingham.
One is that LDC’s definition of the city centre goes beyond the major shopping locations to take in what are known to the property industry as secondary and tertiary locations. It includes, for example, Alfreton Road and Derby Road, the railway station, Sneinton, Huntingdon Street and parts of Mansfield Road.
There are a lot of empty units there, and that’s because they are not part of the retail core, have weak footfall and sometimes poor trading environments. They will struggle at the best of times and in a post-recessionary climate they’ll be in particular difficulty.
Secondly, LDC’s data doesn’t count all shops – it only looks at those used for comparison shopping (like fashion), service retail (like shoe repairs) and convenience stores. It doesn’t include anything occupied by coffee shops, bars and restaurants.
Retail property agents I know were scathing about this decision in particular. Their view is that having a wide selection coffee shops and restaurants is an essential part of the mix for visitors to any major retail destination – in other words, the fact that units are occupied by Costa Coffee rather than a fashion shop is a good thing, not a bad thing.
The agents also said that the data (which was compiled in September last year) had been put together at a time when units in and around Broadmarsh in particular were beginning to empty ahead of a £40m revamp. Others, they insisted, were between lettings – something LDC’s surveyors would not have known.
When I eventually spoke to Matthew Hopkinson, who drew up the report, he said that taking out the vacancies around Broadmarsh would probably have knocked only a single digit off the number. Buit putting leisure uses back into the data would have knocked nearly four per cent off the vacancy rate.
To my eyes, 19-20 per cent vacant is still a high figure, but it probably reflects the decision to include those fringe areas which major retailers would never go near.
Mr Hopkinson (who does know Nottingham, by the way) admitted that at least some of the criticisms may have been valid. FHP, probably the major agency for retail lettings in Nottingham, estimates the true figure for what we know as Shoppingham is somewhere between 11 and 14 per cent.
The statistical discrepancies don’t mean some of the points made by LDC are not relevant. Major chains are constantly looking for bigger shop units so that they can properly display their ranges and exploit the click-and-collect trend – research and ordering of goods online, followed by touch, feel advice and collection in store. The city doesn't have enough big units.
In a weak consumer climate in particular, well-known brands remain vulnerable to discounters – whether it’s Tesco or Poundland, a bottle of Head & Shoulders is the same there as it is in Boots. But it might be cheaper. The supermarkets are also becoming big players in home electricals, and only first-rate service from very knowledgeable staff will stop people buying on price alone.
The city centre also has its problem areas. Flying Horse Walk (or the FH Mall, as it became) has never fulfilled its potential, the streets around the Market Square are surprisingly downmarket for a wonderful meeting place in the shadow of civic grandeur, and the supposed independent retail quarter in Hockley still feels like the poor relation.
Indeed, there are some massive opportunities in the centre for brave retailers and developers. We call it the Council House, but what I see is a great location for iconic brands like Harvey Nichols or Betty’s. Who knows…
Finally – as Mr Hopkinson correctly observed – a city that regards itself as a retail destination must make sure there is a steady stream of events and themed occasions to keep people entertained on a day out.
So, Nottingham is clearly not in the kind of trouble LDC’s numbers might suggest. The best part of £300m is about to be invested in expanding or improving the Victoria Centre and Broadmarsh and I know some major retail names are still waiting to come here.
But there’s still plenty for the newly-formed Retail Business Improvement District to get its teeth into.