MIDLANDS
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OVER THE COMING YEARS, PLACES THAT WERE ONCE FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF SHOPPING AND LEISURE WILL BE REPRESENTED AS PLACES TO WORK AND LIVE.
Birmingham is a city undergoing a multi billion pound investment programme, compared to Wolverhampton with its rising vacancies, falling footfall, an acute oversupply of retail stock and competition from other retail centres and destinations. This is a picture we have seen repeated across the region, be it the announcement of store closures by M&S in towns such as Northampton and Sutton Coldfield, or the shelving of the proposed Friarsgate shopping centre in Lichfield, as falling consumer and retailer demand impacts on viability.
2018 can be viewed as the year that the various stakeholders in town centres finally woke up to the scale of the challenge, with councils in particular looking to safeguard the future of once thriving town centres from falling into terminal decline.
These interventions include direct investment in shopping centres to implement redevelopment through regeneration and bid teams, or the renegotiation of the gearing in head leases to relieve the burden of punitive head rents that have not adjusted to the wider reduction in rental income and rising void costs.
OUTLOOK There are now instances in the Midlands and across the UK where former shopping centres have ceased to be profitable assets as the costs of running them out strips the rental income – in the growing number of these situations redevelopment for alternative uses has become the accepted strategy. Over the coming years, places that were once for the sole purpose of shopping and leisure will be represented as places to work and live, with schools and health hubs also being proposed.
However, it should not be assumed that shopping as a day-to-day leisure activity is a thing of the past. Across the region dominant shopping centres in Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and Birmingham continue to thrive, albeit with adjusted business plans to reflect changes in spending and occupational costs for retailers who seek to balance their bricks and mortar estate with online spending.
It is in the peripheral destinations where 2018 has seen the greatest impact and proposals developing for change, as the shops of the past become the hotels, offices and even public realm of the future.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE MARKET
RETAIL REIMAGINED
MONEY
IS THIS THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF ONLINE RETAILING?
KNOWLEDGE
SHOPPING WITH A CONSCIENCE
FOOD
REGIONAL UPDATES
CONTACTS
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