by Mark Potiriadis
Radical redistribution of the population in favour of the older generations will occur in the immediate future: in the next five years, it is forecast, the 5-19 age group will decline by 70%, while the number of 45-59-year-olds will increase by 14%.
The upshot for the leisure market is that families will no longer be the point of focus for many facilities because there will be more couples with grown-up children. There will be fewer young users of swimming pools, more people whose needs are not yet catered for, and a greater spending capacity through the predominance of the older age groups.
Leisure will therefore become much more a specialist service targeted at minority — but well-defined — groups: the old, the over 40s, the disabled, mothers, the very young, and teenagers. This has happened with “dry” sport facilities, and the principle can also be seen in the swimming market, with sessions arranged exclusively for groups such as sub-aqua, canoeists or mothers and toddlers.
Local authorities
It is instructive in this respect to see how the trends in leisure have, at any one time, influenced the evolution and design of various buildings we live with, whether they are provided by local authorities or commercial interest. Swimming pools present a clear example, leading up to today’s commercial waterparks.
First there were competition pools which dealt with teaching people how to swim and how to enjoy swimming once they had learnt. Next, leisure pools were developed, targeted at a particular sector of the population — much wider than just swimmers — who wanted fun from the water. These pools all had an attractive ambiance to provide greater pleasure for the non-serious swimmer.
The next step was that even more individual types of user were specifically targeted — day trippers to resorts such as Rhyl, for example. There the pool was designed to increase the level of tourism and was made more profitable by the provision of catering facilities and bars.
Over the past three years there has been even more specialisation — with holiday centres like Butlin’s providing large-scale “waterworlds” for the enjoyment of resident visitors (as well as up to 500,000 day visitors a year). Such pools cost perhaps £5m or £6m each and ingeniously use water technology to create a whole series of enjoyable water features.
The local authorities are now responding to that challenge with their own entertainment pools. Bracknell is an example and, besides a strong catering element with over 200 seats, it will have “fun” features such as a pirate galleon, volcano, disco island and rapids, as well as quiet areas like a “sauna world” for people who do not want to be among the bustle of the children in the main swimming pool. There is specialist lighting to create a theatrical atmosphere for events. (So the “theatre” of retail exists also in leisure.)
Looking to the future, we have to realise that pools in the United States are surrounded by themed catering and have features such as bumper cars and miniature railways. In Europe, water parks may be limited in capacity and capital cost, but if they stand on their own in the right location they can give a good commercial return on investment: they now feature in some of the large retail developments in the UK, as they have in the States.
Commercial leisure
Commercial leisure started with activities that could be run profitably, like cinemas, night clubs, casinos, discos, amusement arcades, pier attractions, squash and — for a while — ten-pin bowling. Looking at the annual reports of the big leisure companies you see them not building sports hall and pools, but concentrating on entertainment, especially nightlife.
The turning point, possibly, was the success of The Point in Milton Keynes, where 1m admissions a year prove that there is a market for the multi-screen cinema. New cinema buildings are essentially simple: technology allows the same film to be run from one projector on more than one screen, and there are a lot of films to see. Far from finally killing off the cinema business, brought to death’s door by television, video seems to have revived it by recreating a taste for film going. There are numerous operators looking for sites, including names less familiar over here than Rank, Warner and Granada — such as AMC, CIC, Odeon Cineplex, National Amusements and Hoyte.
Another old favourite that is coming back is ten-pin bowling, severely reduced in numbers by the property boom of the early 1970s from around 125 to scarcely 60 sites. The game is comparatively less expensive than it was, and the environment in these buildings is now being made much more attractive.
Until the market is saturated — on current thinking there is demand for around 60 multiscreen cinemas, while the scope for ten-pin bowling can be judged historically — these are two very promising candidates for commercial leisure developments.
Retailing
In the past the first task of retailers was to provide commodities. The change in this basic trading philosophy (“pile it high and sell it cheap”, as Tesco’s Jack Cohen used to say) started with town-centre developments where an area of the town became pedestrianised and there was car parking nearby; this way retailers had better access to the public.
The problems of the town centre are well known. Just as property developers and estate surveyors have always stressed location in the past, today’s emphasis is firmly on car parking. For old-style comparison shopping it is not a problem but, of course, the town centre has little leisure sprinkled about it. The “critical mass” of leisure is not there to attract people as a destination.
Shopping malls, as the next stage, became both in-town and out-of-town projects, and with them came the sharp-focusing of targeted customers exemplified by the success of niche retailers like The Sock Shop and Tie Rack, and the presence of newer names like Just Shirts.
Trevor Savage of Team Leisure makes an interesting observation on the way food retailers have changed over the years. “In one outer London area, Sainsbury began with over-the-counter service, then a small self-service store, then a superstore with a multi-storey car park which provided a small swimming pool by way of planning gain,” he says. “Now they are considering setting up beside main arterial routes nearby where they already have Homebase.”
Out-of-town and edge-of-town development has been a strong market recently. It began with cash-and-carry and then discount shopping in out-of-the-way sites for bulky items: the food stores followed because shoppers could wheel bulk purchases by basket to boot. Then the quality stores, after false starts and resistance, finally realised what would happen. With Marks & Spencer, Laura Ashley, John Lewis and Habitat evolving strategies that make them equally happy in town or out, there was a surge in planning applications. It was convincing stores like Marks & Spencer and Debenhams that gave John Hall his final momentum for the viability of the Metro Centre.
Out-of-town retail benefits from the availability of simple buildings, often grouped in one area: B&Q, Homebase, Texas, W H Smith Do It All, Queensway, MFI, Carpetland. This has several effects. First, creating car-borne comparison shopping on a grand scale. Second, the grouping becomes a destination point. Third, scope grows for other than bulk products. Fourth, in some areas saturation point arrives and funding sources may turn to other developments in similar locations — commercial leisure.
Eating and drinking
Leisure is changing, retailing is changing, and so are catering and drinking habits. Of the several connections between retail and leisure, this is the crucial one, for eating and drinking are leisure.
People are much more mobile nowadays (when their very mobility is not trapping them in traffic jams). Youngsters want places to go and, if they are not unemployed, they seem to have money. The licensing laws are soon to change. An ageing population is retiring earlier with money to enjoy. Ethnic menus are creating variety.
The importance of food and drink to anywhere which — like a large shopping or leisure centre — attracts a lot of people, is now well recognised. In the city centre it has always been the restaurant in the store, the pub, the small cafe, a wine bar. In the large shopping mall it is becoming the food court where there is the opportunity to rest and refuel in a variety of ways. Recent examples are Clockworks at the Metro Centre, the Food Gallery in Birmingham, Eldon Square in Newcastle and Victoria Place, over London’s Victoria Station — where there is waitress service — and speciality restaurants like Garfunkels are also having the confidence to open up in or next to these centres.
Just as shopping can be a form of leisure activity, so is eating and drinking. Accordingly, the boundaries between leisure and retailing are becoming much less distinct than they were.
Added to this, leisure is creating a momentum of its own — particularly in eating out. Convenience-led people do not cook so much, nor do two-career cohabitants. The market is there to make eating out a leisure experience on a much wider scale, and suiting more pockets, than ever before in Britain. A hierarchy of eating places at different prices is being created by the commercial catering operators. New names will be seen on neon signs the length and breadth of the country, though more, inevitably, in the South East: TGI Fridays, Sam & Martha’s, Muswells, Calendars, Sullivans, Chi-Chi’s. Pizza and pasta houses are increasing in numbers, Mexican food is in vogue, and we never have been short of Indian or Chinese restaurants.
Coming together
The importance of this movement is that it needs places, nice places, to go. And so . . . full circle back to the new commercial leisure centres. Both they and retailing benefit from access to large numbers of people. I believe that in many cases the two will be able to interlink out-of-town just as, historically, they have in the town centre. This will come about through juxtaposition — sometimes a stand-alone commercial leisure complex will be sited near out-of-town shopping. More commonly, however, the profitable ingredients that make up the new commercial leisure complexes will be injected into new retail parks, providing the ideal locations that the leisure operators need.
It will soon be the case that a retail scheme without leisure will be incomplete. Apart from food shopping, an expedition for non-food goods can be a leisure expedition, and having other leisure activities at hand is complementary to the idea of a pleasant day out at an attractive destination.
A balanced mix of leisure creates advantages for retailers, giving character and focus for the destination, making the sense of occasion greater, and getting people to stay longer and spend more. And the idea works the other way round when retailing is added into leisure developments. You not only have the minor prospect of more shops to do with leisure products — from clothing to equipment, health foods to books about sport and entertainment — but large-scale leisure will attract large-scale retail as a component part. The Battersea Power Station leisure conversion is to have over 200,000 sq ft of retail as part of its theme park setting.
Similarly, food-and-leisure courts will appear, combining shopping with, perhaps, a themed pub, children’s play area, a health club and a multiplex cinema.
Conflicts
The link, ultimately, depends on detail — how it is done. If it is not done well, it will not work.
First, “critical mass”. One cannot conceive a leisure provision with much less than 10% of the total area, including food, in a modern shopping mall (ratios of 25% are now a reality in several schemes). Equally, on a stand-alone commercial leisure unit, like the one to be built in Watford by Citygrove, a minimum area of about 100,000 sq ft as well as parking for about 700 cars is needed. Many people will say that extra car parking for leisure is not necessary because the peak periods for retail and leisure are not the same. This is not true. There can be a conflict. The car-parking capacity of a retail centre will have to be increased when leisure is added.
Operational requirements are also different. Opening hours go beyond 8pm for leisure whereas retailers may not wish to be open later than that because of operating costs, unless window shopping is regarded as equally important by retailers as saving on such costs.
Another myth is that the same people will visit leisure and retail. The spin-off of the two is there, but the numbers are not exactly equal. A large retail mall, like Milton Keynes, may attract 10m customers a year. If you had in parallel, say, on the other side of the car park, a commercial leisure-only centre of 160,000 sq ft, it would attract 1m of the 10m people who came to the retail. It would also have a total of 3m leisure visits. Out of those, one-third would be using the retail. So there is a draw from the leisure to the retail. The result is that the total retail customers would be 11m, and the total pure leisure customers would be 2m.
Local authorities keen on privatisation will be important to retail and leisure developments in terms of the responses they choose, and are likely, to give. The conflict here is between what the local authority supplies on the rates, with subsidised charges, as an amenity and what commercial operators will supply, left to themselves. As a sports hall is not profitable only the local authority can supply it. Nicholas Ridley’s clampdown on the barter system has endangered a likely solution here, for, with so many leisure ingredients on the shopping lists of local authorities they could have fought for retail schemes which not only embodied cinemas and bowling alleys, discos and nightclubs, food courts, fashion shows and health clubs but also a water park and a sports hall or two.
Mark Potiriadis is a partner in leisure architects and consultants Sargent & Potiriadis.