Oh What a Circus

bristol | corporations | opinion/analysis Tuesday September 23, 2008 20:25 by George Nonbio

No safety net for Bristol's consumer culture

“Roll Up, Roll Up. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the unique and splendiferous; to the fantastic and extraordinary...the Cabot Circus Launch event! This will be a day of amazing performances, incredible music and a theatrical extravaganza” says the welcome message on the Cabot Circus home page. The Visit Bristol website reads “Having taken over three years to build and costing in excess of £500 million, Cabot Circus will provide city centre visitors with over 120 new shops, including 15 major flagship stores.”

What neither of these sites remember to mention is that around 40 of these so called “new” stores already exist in Bristol, many will simply be moving up the road leaving empty shells in Broadmead and yet more in the Galleries, as yet some of the spaces that will be created still have not been filled.

Another issue conveniently neglected is that on the day of the grand opening one third of the new units in Cabot Circus will stand empty as branches will not have moved in and contracts still have not been signed. The city is simply over saturated; we already have at least one of each high street chain.

The cabot circus cage

“Roll Up, Roll Up. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the unique and splendiferous; to the fantastic and extraordinary...the Cabot Circus Launch event! This will be a day of amazing performances, incredible music and a theatrical extravaganza” says the welcome message on the Cabot Circus home page. The Visit Bristol website reads “Having taken over three years to build and costing in excess of £500 million, Cabot Circus will provide city centre visitors with over 120 new shops, including 15 major flagship stores.”

What neither of these sites remember to mention is that around 40 of these so called “new” stores already exist in Bristol, many will simply be moving up the road leaving empty shells in Broadmead and yet more in the Galleries, as yet some of the spaces that will be created still have not been filled.

Another issue conveniently neglected is that on the day of the grand opening one third of the new units in Cabot Circus will stand empty as branches will not have moved in and contracts still have not been signed. The city is simply over saturated; we already have at least one of each high street chain.

In an interview with Andy Garbut, director at PricewaterhouseCoopers he highlighted that “the number of voids [empty units] in high streets is averaging 10 per cent.” Mr Garbut said he expected this to rise over the coming months as the economy teeters on the brink of a recession and consumers cut back even more. He added that “in some towns, the number of voids is closer to 30 per cent… We believe the void rate is increasing… and the problem is only going to get more acute after Christmas."

So it seems that far from putting Bristol in the top five shopping cities like the developers claim, we will be left with a ghost town littered with empty stores. The glitzy designer stores of the Circus may attract out-of-towners who will clog up the already overcrowded city centre roads but many locals and the students who drive a large section of the cities economy will be out priced. Visitors will be attracted away from the independent stores in St. Nicholas Market, Gloucester Road and Park Street, an area of retail in which Bristol is already severely lacking.

Property consultants say those new shopping centres that have already opened this year, such as Liverpool One, have drawn a significant number of consumers away from neighbouring towns. Meanwhile, mid-market chains such as Dolcis, Ethel Austin, Select Retail and MK One have closed dozens of high street stores after collapsing into administration.

There is no place for this shopping centre in Bristol. As the world economy is collapsing, consumers spend less and debt soars capitalist developers put their heads in the sand and stick to the ethos of “if you build it they will come”. Not content with just one beacon of high street homogenisation and corporate greed in the South-west, Bath is currently working on their own.

People will be heading down to the Circus on Thursday and again on Saturday to show their disproval and have a little fun at the same time. Join in with the zombie walk “A protest against over-consumerisation and the homogenisation of city centres” on Saturday 27th September. Assemble at the Bandstand in Castle Park,
at 11:00am, shamble & lurch from noon.