“Build and they shall come” is a mantra commonly wheeled out in difficult market conditions, often in tandem with optimistic urban regeneration plans. And in these post-recessionary times, it’s one that’s had more than its fair share of airings across the East Midlands. If only it were true.
Take the office sector: not long ago the argument went that Derby city centre was crying out for grade-A accommodation as the last brand new space there had been built well over a generation before. In the interim, shiny new space appeared on the edge of the city, at the appropriately named Pride Park, but it had always been known that supply there was finite.
In any case the city, impressed by the transformation of its dowdy Eagle Centre into the gleaming shopping paragon that is Westfield Derby, wanted to sprinkle a similar glitter over its CBD office stock. So the city council invested £3m of an innovative £17.5m regeneration fund in a joint venture with Lowbridge (Derby) to speculatively start the Friar Gate Square scheme. Around 30,000 sq ft of pristine offices were duly completed earlier this year but, despite much talk, the scheme has yet to find a tenant (see feature, p80).
Moving on to retail, let’s stay in Derby, where exactly six years since the Eagle centre doubled in size to 1.1m sq ft, the downside to its phoenix-like rise mentioned above has been an increase in empty shops on the high street and Cathedral Quarter.
So if building, per se, isn’t the answer to unlocking future regeneration, what is? This was the question rattling last month’s Re:Fest seminar in Nottingham. Keynote speaker and retail turnaround specialist Bill Grimsey partly answered it in his recent Alternative High Street review (see feature, p76) when he suggested that in a city with two large shopping centres, adding new shops might not be the answer.
Talking to Re:Fest delegates, it became clear that building new space will, of course, always be necessary, but utilising existing ones better is also important. More sophisticated methods of demand analysis for modern space will also help prevent future Mary Celeste commercial buildings; yet determining these methods is still very much a work in progress.
