The Way We Were
CENTRAL SIX RETAIL PARK, COVENTRY
Summer 1998, Coventry
‘You could pick up an E30-generation BMW 3-Series for roughly the price of a night out’
The High Street may once have reigned supreme, but out-of-town shopping centres predominated by the end of the Nineties – as did certain types of car…
‘Oh no, not ruddy Cheshire Oaks again!’ one of CCW’s more northern scribes exclaimed after having glanced at this week’s shot.
Of course, seasoned shoppers of the Midlands will know that this is actually Central Six, 80 miles south of the strikingly similar set of outlet shops on the Wirral, but that only helps to underline a wider truth about the way Brits were spending their weekends towards the end of the century.
Developers increasingly turned to US-style, out-of-town shopping centres from the late Eighties onwards – where you might have trawled a busy high street in search of a new tie ten years earlier, now you might have been perusing a Matalan or TK Maxx in search of freshly-discounted clobber.
Central Six – so-named because it’s just off junction six of Coventry’s inner ring road – might have been built a stone’s throw from the West Coast Main Line in a former railway goods yard, but it’s been clearly been built with ‘Mondeo Man’ in mind. We can see two in the foreground of this shot alone, and the family itching to get out of their Montego Countryman are spoilt for choice when it comes to empty spaces, even though the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it orange badge means that they’re likely entitled to one of the disabled spaces right outside the shopfronts.
Let’s start at the very front, and between the Fiat Punto and the E33-generation Mitsubishi Galant there’s a 1.6-litre Peugeot 205 GTI. You’d have been able to get change from £1500 for a decent example back in 1998 but would be looking at £7-9k for the same car today. It’s now firmly in classic territory.
Immediately behind is the nation’s best-selling car – the Ford Fiesta – although it’ll lose that honour later in the year when the Focus is introduced. On the left-hand side is a Fiesta Classic in Cabaret trim – a sort of final fling for the MkIII after its curvier 1995 successor was announced. There’s also a 1991 1.1-litre Popular Plus, and on the end an example of the aforementioned MkIV – a five-door LX – which would go on to lend its underpinnings to the Ka and Puma.
You’re probably not looking at the Fiestas anyway, but the car squeezed neatly between them that’s already fast approaching classic-dom. This Mini isn’t a lowly City or Mayfair – which would have still been a fairly common sight in central Coventry in the late Nineties – but a special edition Thirty model from 1989, whose interior previewed the revived Cooper. G132 LHG is still out there and currently on SORN, according to DVLA records – is it your Mini, tucked away in a garage?
Head further back past the XNspec Peugeot 106 and Vauxhall Cavalier MkIII and you’re into a curious blend of Eighties and Nineties bestsellers, headed up by a Merit-spec Vauxhall Astra MkII. It’s joined by a mid-range Rover 214 Si – this, being a 1992 car, would have been a pre-facellift example – and one of the oldest cars in this shot, a 1989 Ford Escort L. We’re guessing from the missing hubcap that it’s already fairly tired and was probably outlived even by the Austin Metro Vanden Plas parked up a row behind it – the Escort vanished from the DVLA’s records 18 months after this shot was taken.
It’s flanked by three far newer cars to the left of the shot – a Ford Mondeo MkII, although one where the owner’s ahead of market trends by going for a turbodiesel – plus a Renault Laguna MkI and a Hyundai Accent. An honourable mention, too, for the Fiat Tempra tucked into the space immediately ahead of the Escort – there are just 22 estimated UK survivors today.
Speaking of Metros, there are a couple of other notable examples dotted around Central Six – a little further up there’s a 1998 Rover 114 GSi, which would have been one of the last examples to leave Longbridge following the model’s disastrous one-star performance in the new Euro NCAP crash tests. Top Gear memorably gave it a sendoff earlier that summer, bookended with a specially written eulogy from Liverpudlian poet, Roger McGough. There’s also what looks like an All White special edition MG Metro tucked behind the Ford Escort MkV, which itself is parked alongside a red three-door Vauxhall Frontera – the MkII would be unveiled later that summer.
There are countless other familiar faces worth mentioning – not least a gloriously barge-like Volvo 960 cruising past a rather lovely burnt orange Vauxhall Tigra, with a cheeky little maroon Fiat Cinquecento parked just ahead – but the one that really dates this image is the E30-generation BMW 3 Series, not because of its presence here but because of what its owner has done to it.
Parked right outside Outfit, a couple of spaces along from the Alfa Romeo 146, is a sunroof-equipped two-door that’s clearly been lowered and treated to a set of chunky aftermarket five-spoke alloy wheels – a reflection of how you could pick up this now-coveted Munich saloon for the price of a night out in Trainspotting- era Britain.
Today you’d need at least £5k in order to bag an E30 in the same sort of condition and a low-mileage 325i Sport made an astonishing £51k at auction in 2019.
Wonder what our discount-hungry Nineties shoppers – whether here or at Cheshire Oaks – would have made of that?