Comment: Trinity Leeds and Buchanan Street – the last hurrah?

Leeds and Glasgow were the locations last week in which excited, or so it seemed, shoppers headed out to inspect new shopping destinations. In Leeds it was the long-awaited Trinity Leeds shopping centre that stole the headlines (newspapers as far afield as the Globe and Mail, published in Toronto, covered this one – testimony to a well-executed PR push), while in Scotland’s commercial capital it was a tranche of new shops at the upper end of Buchanan Street.

To an extent the noise generated by all of this is a bit like the proverbial buses that arrive as threesomes at the same moment, except that this is retail property, so couples are more decorous and also indicative of a generally empty depot.  And in both cities there were some good new shops to take a look at, with the prize for best looking new store probably going to the Paperchase in Glasgow with it’s two-floor homage to spare-looking interiors.

And that is probably about it for new shopping schemes in 2013. Incidentally, it is worth remarking that both developments are the work of Land Securities and are the outcome of a pipeline that was far fuller when they were fed into it, than is now the case. The reality of new stores and shops these days is that they are pretty thin on the ground, because there’s space aplenty thanks to the continued thinning out that is taking place on high streets around the country.

What is encouraging however is that in both Leeds and Glasgow, retailers had opted to take space and put their best design feet forward to create real destinations. ‘Prime is prime’ is one of those maxims that developers in search of hiking the rents charged to their tenants tend to be fond of trotting out. That said, it does seem to be the case and the number of shoppers attracted to locations of this kind is still likely to be greater than might be supposed if the pulling power of the individual stores’ that are in them were added up. The sum of the parts is greater than …well, you know the rest.

Overall, however, the retail cake is being nibbled away by a moribund economy and creeping consumer fear.

Which means that high streets from Workington to Dudley will suffer as shoppers rush to spend their hard-earned in prime locations. Good news for those developers that operate the big schemes, bad news for secondary locations which a look increasingly tertiary.