Whiteley shopping centre is one of the few significant UK retail schemes to launch this year. John Ryan visited on opening day.
Last week, another shopping centre opened. This time, in contrast to Trinity Leeds, the action moved towards the south coast as shoppers queued up to get their free balloons and bucks fizz in the shops that comprise the Whiteley shopping mall, roughly equidistant between Southampton and Portsmouth.
This 320,000 sq ft centre has been developed by British Land and has opened 91% let, which sounds pretty good at a point when many shopping developments are struggling to hang on to their tenants.
Equally impressive is the fact that most of the bastions of the mid-market, particularly fashion, have opted to take space here. Their latest formats on display, adapted to take account of the fact that triple-height units have been on offer. From a pragmatic perspective, this means that many of the shops have mezzanines or large atriums just inside their main doors.
It is also worth noting that as this is an outdoor mall, the architects have opted to clad everything in wood which gives the scheme a sustainable feeling and provides a consistency of appearance across the whole.
Of the 58 shops that have taken space at Whiteley, 48 were open for business as the confetti gun was fired on May 23. Another 10 are due to open over the summer. With a development cost of £84m this is not on the scale of Trinity Leeds, but it is a significant scheme at a time when few new centres are rising out of the ground.
It takes the place of an outlet centre that never really found favour owing to the opening of Portsmouth’s Gunwharf Quays outlet centre, which seized the initiative when it opened in 2001.
Whiteley
Size 320,000 sq ft
Opened May 23, 2013
Anchor stores Marks & Spencer, Topshop/Topman and Next
Ambiance Wood-clad sustainable
Tiger
Danish retailer Tiger has been opening stores fairly rapidly ever since the first UK branch flung wide its doors in Croydon in 2009. This is a shop that you walk into and emerge clutching lots of things you didn’t know you wanted. It’s the IKEA principle and perhaps it’s the bedrock of Scandi shopping. Whatever the case, like Ikea, once you enter this store the mid-shop fixtures have been organised so that you are taken on a journey around the interior, whether you like it or not.
In so doing, you come across tightly merchandised white units that allow the brightly coloured stock to do the talking. The store also makes much of the rows of pendant LED lights above the units - a feature that sets it apart from its competition.
Tiger is about pocket money-priced impulse purchasing and on opening day this was one of the busiest shops in the centre.
Marks & Spencer
The Marks & Spencer store in Whiteley serves as shorthand for the current state of play at the retailer. This one has the ‘Classic’ department (first seen in Bluewater), with its package of graphics and pictures, close to the front door. There is also a beauty department and a bakery, both of which carry the design imprint of the interiors that were first shown in central London in 2011 and 2012.
As this is a two-floor shop, the cafe is on the first floor alongside much of the clothing offer. And for anybody who has visited the Cheshire Oaks leviathan, which opened in the autumn, the exterior will also strike a familiar note with its large M&S logo standing proud of the structure and the use of wood and glass. The latter means that this is a very light interior and levels of lighting are relatively low - in line with the retailer’s continued Plan A efforts.
This is a generally welcoming shop and if all of M&S’s branches looked and felt like this one, the battle to get the store portfolio up to scratch would not be an ongoing issue.
Clintons
It is perhaps a measure of the relative confidence that the management of the rescued Clintons has in the brand that this is a new store. As such, it features the cherry-red logo and blue perimeter and light wood interior that was first unveiled in London’s Cheapside last year.
The problem, however, is that this is a narrow unit and a lot has been crammed into it. That means that the central card gondola that runs from the front to the rear of the shop acts as a Maginot Line almost totally dividing one part of the shop from another.
The merchandise collection is the same as in other new Clinton stores, but owing to the manner in which the space has been organised this new shop feels like a mild throwback to the orange-logoed Clintons of old.
Fat Face
As the winner of the Oracle Retail Week Awards 2013 Store Design of the Year, you’d expect this one to be interesting and Fat Face does not disappoint. The first thing that the visitor is likely to see is a log cabin frontage that occupies the higher back half of the store in what would otherwise be a high void. This conceals the staff training room and associated areas, but the shopper will be aware of none of this and will instead look at the faux cabin, complete with a pair of windows.
The rest of the shop is Fat Face standard, but this means a high standard and the visual merchandising in this shop is among Whiteley’s best. There are a lot of raw wooden beams, a reclaimed wood floor and the kind of faded pastel paint on the wall that makes you think skaterboy has hit the Hamptons.
The lifestyle nature of the brand is reinforced by a back-wall graphic, executed in a handwritten font, that states “Embrace Life Outside 9-5”. It’s a simple device, but you know immediately what the brand purports to stand for.
River Island
The young fashion retailer brings a brick-built cellar style to Whiteley with an interior where large areas of the wall are brick-clad and brick arches mark the transition from one room to another. This is a two-floor store with the men’s offer upstairs as in other River Island shops, but the bulk of the action takes place in the ground floor women’s and kidswear sections.
The industrial wannabe ambience is heightened by the warehouse-like pendant lights and the plain wooden floor that runs throughout. As with many stores at the moment, the trend towards creating a neutral interior that foregrounds the stock is evident in this branch of River Island. The shop is also worth a look at for the way in which it uses a black scaffolding-like structure on the ground floor to add interior interest to the wide-open spaces that come with a large unit on this scale.
Topshop/Topman
In common with many other stores in Whiteley, Topshop makes good use of the triple-height frontage to provide shoppers with a light, airy atrium when they enter the shop. To the left, a floor-to-ceiling monochrome graphic gives the onlooker a jumble of black and white letters, set against a grey background, and the only discernible word is ‘Topshop’.
The mezzanine in this store has a balustrade on which the Topman logo is displayed and mannequins are positioned next to this, in case shoppers are in any doubt about what’s upstairs. And although much of the store’s interior space sits beneath the mezzanine level there is little sense of constriction, as it has sufficient height for this not to be an issue.
As with the majority of other Whiteley’s fashion retailers, mannequin armies stand alert in the atrium space. Alongside H&M, Topshop is the most fashion-forward of the offers in this scheme.
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