by Peter M Jones and Keith G Jones
The Government has recently published its draft Planning Guidance Notes on Major Retail Developments (DOE 1987). At the time of writing, these draft guidelines recognise that there has been a marked trend in particular types of retailing towards larger shops which have enabled retailers to become more efficient and to offer customers a larger range of goods. As a result, retailers selling both food and other convenience goods, as well as some comparison goods such as carpets, furniture, electrical appliances and DIY, are finding it advantageous to move to off-centre sites.
It is apparent that this movement towards larger store retailing is one that can be used advantageously to help redevelop rundown inner-city sites. There are numerous examples which illustrate how in particular the large non-food retail warehouses and warehouse parks are being developed and operated successfully in such locations. Examples include:
a) The Canal Road development by Peel in Bradford which is a 109,000-sq ft scheme opened in 1986 on the site of a former power station. It includes four retail warehouses including Queensway, Do-It-All, Dixons and a tile store.
b) The Aireside Centre in Leeds, which is a 132,000-sq ft retail warehouse park with six stores including MFI, Jolly Giant Toys, Queensway and Carpetland, using former derelict railway land outside Leeds city centre.
c) Swansea Enterprise Park, which includes over 300,000 sq ft of retail warehouses on the site of former derelict industrial land and which now includes some 20 different warehouses selling largely non-food items, but also includes a Tesco superstore.
In its draft guidance, the Department of the Environment notes that: “Large retail warehouses have shown themselves to be a successful way of catering for major household goods, bulky DIY items etc. Taking part of these heavy carborne shopping requirements out of the town centre can positively help by relieving the centres of traffic congestion and making them pleasanter places for the more relaxed and varied shopping activities and other town-centre uses.
“Both these types of retail development (the large food stores and retail warehouses) can often make good use of derelict and neglected sites within urban areas and result in positive environmental gain and new local employment opportunities.”
This guidance provides strong support for the concept of decanting selected elements of retailing from existing centres on to inner urban area sites. Indeed, some planning authorities have now taken this up in reshaping their policies and are indicating that such developments could be acceptable. The most recent example is Leeds City Council, which has produced an Interim Strategy for major comparison shopping developments (October 1987). In this new interim policy the council has taken account of the evolution of Government policy to propose a further development of the city’s own policies to favour the inner city.
In particular, the new strategy indicates that the large stores selling both bulky goods and other comparison goods — which cover virtually the whole of comparison or durable goods sector — would be permitted where they could contribute to the renewal of the inner-city areas, would be of benefit to inner-city residents, and would be acceptable on traffic grounds and in relation to other planning policies. Several major proposals for the city, including a substantial retail warehouse park of some 210,000 sq ft to the south of the city centre and extensions to the Aireside Centre, will in principle at least, therefore become acceptable forms of development to aid the regeneration of rundown areas.
The concept of the retail warehouse park generally has been taken up enthusiastically by developers. A properly planned and purpose-built scheme can provide benefits for retailers who are able to share parking and trade off one another’s customers. As important has been the support from local planning authorities and financial organisations who now appreciate the longer term investment growth that a well-designed and located retail warehouse park can offer.
However, the success of the concept is leading to changes. Pressure is now growing from a representation from a wider range of retailers than the original “group of three” — DIY, furniture/carpets and electrical goods. Children’s clothes and toys, leisure wear, auto parts and services, shoes and clothes are now competing for space and planning permissions in retail warehouse parks.
Other supporting activities are also being proposed as part of new retail developments, particularly in the form of catering outlets such as burger bars, fast food outlets, cafes and “diners”. At the newly opened Roaring Meg in Stevenage, a 200,000-sq ft-gross scheme located outside the town, outlets include Pizza Hut, Quick Fast Food and a Harvesters Steak Bar. These are sited within the car parks and will draw trade both from customers to the Queensway furniture store, Texas DIY, Toys R Us and other retail warehouses within the scheme as well as from passersby and people living within the immediate catchment area. A further example is McDonald’s, who have opened a fast food outlet in the middle of the car park at the Merry Hill Centre in Dudley in the West Midlands.
The major attraction of a planned retail warehouse park scheme, either within an inner-city location or outside in the suburban location, is that retailers can sell their goods on a scale that is appropriate to the bulky nature of most of their merchandise, and which allows customers to purchase and take away their goods easily by car from the store door.
At the same time a well-designed tenant mix within a retail warehouse park will give shoppers the opportunity to assess products in those lines where comparison is helpful, for example, in furniture and carpets or electrical goods where a good retail warehouse park could have two or more such stores enabling an element of complementariness and competition to take place.
For the planners and the inner-city policy makers the retail warehouse parks provide a location for a use that is creating difficult problems in the existing built-up fringes of our towns and cities where ad hoc planning permissions for individual stores have caused environmental, traffic and amenity problems for local (and in some cases not-so-local) residents. The parks also provide significant employment of a type that matches the skills available in our inner-city areas: they may even provide the catalyst for new investment in inner-city locations.
For the operator they provide the locational advantages already mentioned and offer the ability to provide purpose-built stores not constrained by tight site boundaries.
But what of the future? Can these retail warehouse parks become a permanent and positive force in the pattern of retailing in the first decade of the 21st century or will they merely be a shopping phenomenon of the 1980s?
We believe they could be an important part of our shopping hierarchy and could be especially valuable in the regeneration of our inner cities. The problems of the “mega centre”, the hypermarket and the superstore have all been very well rehearsed in numerous town hall public inquiries over the last few years. (Indeed, the public inquiry industry has possibly had a faster growth rate than the retail industry!) But these retail warehouse parks could be a special type of inner-city “midicentre”. If carefully located it appears that they may be complimentary rather than competitive with existing town and city centres. On derelict land a retail warehouse park with major parking facilities close to the prime shopping area, with effective related public transport uniting the two, might answer many of our own-centre problems. They can provide much-needed employment, and investors, developers and operators will probably be confident enough to “trail blaze” and invest early in the cycle of innercity regeneration, knowing that customers are unlikely to be put off by derelict sites in the vicinity.
However, all this may sound too good to be true. There can be no doubt that the environmental conditions associated with some of the early examples of this form of retailing leave much to be desired. Their warehouse parentage too often shows through in their stark shed-like appearance, lack of landscaping, use of less-than-exciting materials and so on. Later examples have improved on this and the widening of the tenant base of these developments will, no doubt, encourage the trend to more attractive designs.
There is also the danger that these centres will merely turn into larger out-of-town shopping centres. It is essential that this should be avoided. If this happens the very benefits outlined above will be negated by the undoubted damage that would result from a centre directly competing with other shopping centres close by. It must be left to the developers and the planners to prevent this happening by entering into appropriate section 52 agreements to control the type of retailing that can take place in such developments. Although this may be difficult, it must be done, so that a significant inner-city opportunity is grasped and utilised to its full extent.
