Last week’s high-profile christening of Liverpool One stands as a case in point. The scheme is far from fully let, but you can bet that there are plenty of retailers waiting to see how it performs. If things go well – and it won’t be long before results start emerging about how John Lewis is doing in its new store – then it’s a fair bet there will be a queue of retail property heads waiting for the good people at developer Grosvenor to take their call.
Yet it doesn’t seem long since a scheme like the one that has just opened in the European City of Culture would have been almost 100 per cent pre-let when the starting gun sounded. It’s worth noting too that the great majority of those who would have signed on the dotted line would have done so for a minimum of five years.
And, make no mistake, this is a fine-looking piece of urban regeneration. Grosvenor’s£950m contribution to Liverpool’s year-long showing-off period is one of the best new developments that this country has seen – yet still there is reticence. No surprise perhaps when the current state of the retail economy is considered, and bearing in mind that, the last time anybody looked, this city had still not broken into UK retail’s top 10.
At the moment, from a retailer’s perspective, opening a new store in Liverpool is an act of faith, and there are those who are prepared to make that leap and others who remain agnostic, pending further evidence. It’s a pattern that is being repeated nationwide as the retail property pipeline, about which so much has been written, continues to gush new space onto the market.
With Silverburn and Liverpool One now up and sort of running, next up will be Westfield’s White City behemoth. This is the one that nobody seems certain about – whether it will have an effect on the nearby West End or indeed whether it will open fully let. One thing seems clear, however: getting departmental store anchors into a scheme at an early stage is no longer any kind of guarantee that a shopping development will prosper.
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