Could Galleries plan save the city centre?
THE city centre in Glasgow has been facing an identity crisis for years now. Cars or no cars? Shopping or residential, or both? The pandemic has forced changes that, it is now evident, are not going to be fully reversed.
The city centre is not what it once was. Why would it be?
People change how they live their lives, new technology forces change and businesses and cities need to adapt to it.
The days of tens of thousands of people coming into the city streets for shopping will not return in the way they once did.
The number of people in city centre offices is likely to be permanently reduced, as hybrid working is going to be a regular feature of working life.
To continue in the current trajectory would be to ignore not only what has been happening in the last decade but also what is taking place now.
You don’t need to be a town planner or economist to see that high street shopping is in decline and the number of empty units, particularly big department stores, is only going to increase.
In recent years in Glasgow city centre, stores over many levels have been disappearing. Dunnes Stores, which in turn replaced Littlewoods and C&A. Gone.
BHS, British Home Stores in old money. Gone
Debenhams which replaced
Lewis’s. Gone. Watt Bros. Gone.
And most recently, Marks & Spencer announced it is to pull out of Sauchiehall Street leaving the future for the remaining stores uncertain.
While we may miss them and lament their absence from the city, the fact is that we have not been using them in sufficient numbers to allow them to survive.
Much has been made about the impact of the devastating fires that closed streets for months.
Sauchiehall Street in particular, and the top of the city centre, suffered hugely from the fires, first, the Art School in 2014 then Victoria’s in March 2018, then the Art School again in June 2018, which destroyed the ABC venue.
While many businesses did not survive the fall-out and closures from the fires, the problems were already there and were growing in momentum.
The decline of Sauchiehall Street can probably be traced back to the opening of Buchanan Galleries not quite 25 years ago.
Ironically it could be the new plans for Buchanan Galleries could be the saviour of Sauchiehall Street.
People in Glasgow would love to see Sauchiehall Street’s fortunes reversed.
There are still no definite plans for the Victoria’s gap site or the BHS site, which saw a plan for offices and a civic square shelved.
High street names were replaced with bargain shops and by cutprice ‘tartan tat’ gift shops.
They are now being replaced by temporary tenants selling liquidated stock from places like Top Shop and Burton which shut their stores.
Buchanan Galleries has also been seeing this decline, although not on the same scale.
The extension to the west of the Street is now left with big empty units that can’t be filled.
The proposed extension to the east with Queen Street Station to create another 500,000 sq ft of retail and leisure space 10 years ago was abandoned.
The fear has been that
Glasgow could fall victim to, what in the USA has been termed, the doughnut effect, where city centres are deserted, people and businesses move to the peripheries and cities are hollowed out from the inside with demolition in the centre, but not to make way for something new.
The good news for Glasgow is that the plan for Buchanan Galleries is addressing these events, changing consumer behaviours and working patterns.
It is not an abandonment of the city centre but an attempt to adapt and create conditions for a sustainable future.
It can be hoped that the transformation of the north end of Buchanan Street into a mixed -use, retail, residential, office and leisure can be a catalyst for others to invest in a changing city centre.
Rather than walking away from the city centre and looking elsewhere, Landsec, the Galleries owner is continuing to invest massively in the city.
It has to be seen as a serious vote of confidence in Glasgow.
The old way was, the city centre drew in people from all over the city and far beyond to the department stores and everything else the city had to offer.
That has been changing for decades.
Even the transport system was set up to support that, with bus and rail routes built in a radial system where almost every route leads to the city centre, and there are few lateral connections across the city’s communities.
The Glasgow Metro should help address that, if and when it comes to fruition.
There have been little pockets of change in the city centre with new developments, mostly hotels, other bigger projects that could seem disconnected from what is going on elsewhere, like the avenues.
But a huge project, like turning a shopping mall into a neighbourhood together with properly thought-out transport improvements could be just what the city centre needs.
The alternative is, after years staring into the abyss, to fall headlong right into it.
It has to be seen as a serious vote of confidence in Glasgow