When I arrived in 2002 Liverpool was a very sad place with an incredibly shrunken retail centre that once traded incredibly well but did no longer. There were under-trading shops, derelict shops and shops turned into offices. The office district had encroached into the retail heart of the city, buildings that were then vacant were being knocked down and turned into surface car parks. As an aside I think surface car parks are the worst possible use of land known to man. People use them from 9.30 and they close at 5.30. I came up from London and was used to being in the office until late but here you had to leave the office before 5.30, take the car out of the car park and park in the street because if you left the office at 7 the car would be locked in for the night in a most insalubrious part of town, because that is what the city centre then was.


Yet people still came to Liverpool to shop, either out of habit or because they had no private transport, and the main shops traded very well. HMV, Top Shop and John Lewis for example all traded incredibly well, overtraded in fact, so, down the line, when it came to compulsory purchase we had to over compensate because the shop was overtrading. And the real big traders who left, such as Habitat, said they would never come back to Liverpool but I am proud to say that Habitat are back in the city once again. Looking back to 2002 I cannot quite believe what we have achieved.


We used to get the Grosvenor Board up from London and say to them that one of the reasons you are here is that when people come out of the train station and see St George’s Hall, you have sold them Liverpool. Many people have a prejudice about Liverpool but when they walk out of Lime Street Station and see St George’s Hall this disappears. Some visitors used to say they would fly up and we would tell them the service is terrible and you do not want to be picked up at Speke. So we would pick them up from the station and walk them past almost every listed building in Liverpool as we took them to our new office.


Regionally there have been 2 major changes between 1971 and now. These are the Trafford Centre in Manchester and Cheshire Oaks Factory Outlet Shopping Centre in the Wirral. Cheshire Oaks got built because of a loophole in the law and in my view, obliterated Liverpool because it gave people an opportunity to park free in surface car parks and stroll to the shops for cheap fashion with good labels. Then the Trafford Centre built on the other side of the catchment area obliterated that side of the retail area too


Liverpool One Selection Process


In the late 1990s Liverpool City Council were approached by Cushman and Wakefield who said you must do something about the state of Liverpool and identify the amount of retail capacity needed to enable the city to be an effective and sustainable model for retail provision. The conclusion was that around a million square foot of retail space was needed.


The city then went out to a number of potential partners and eventually chose Grosvenor. This was due mainly to our track record of commitment to projects and because when we say things we do them. Plus we do not have shareholders, only one shareholder, and what he says goes with the business. We did not have to submit anything financial but had to submit principles, retail ideas, and a framework around which it could be made to work.


This is the league table of the top 20 retail destinations in the UK in 1971, 1989, 2002 and 2004. It shows the decline of Liverpool from the third best trading retail destination in the UK down to 17 in 2002. In 2004 Liverpool’s status rose slightly in anticipation of what was to come. And this was before we had spent any money apart from Rod’s salary. It is much better now, as we shall soon see.


54 Guy Butler ASSET - Liverpool-10


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