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From: "Architexturez." <interface.services@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:01:26 +0530
The secrets of indoor shopping
Joe Moran
Published 12 March 2007
Print version Listen The mall is back in town. No longer relegated to
the suburbs, it is setting up shop again in our urban centres - the
frontline in the great retail fightback against online. Joe Moran reports
Mother-daughter combos are doing the H&M run, bored dads hang around the
Apple Store and the Build-a-Bear Workshop is babysitting the kids. It's
a busy afternoon at the Arndale centre in Manchester, though not quite
as chocka as 27 December last year - the busiest day in the centre's
history, when 180,000 people piled in for the post-Christmas sales. By
5am, when Next opened, there were already a thousand people outside. Who
said the future of retail was online?
For teenagers like me, growing up near Manchester in the 1980s, the
Arndale was a grotty Saturday-afternoon Mecca. It drew nearly a million
shoppers a week despite being the most spirit-sapping building, with an
exterior of dirty yellow tiling aptly named "the longest lavatory wall
in Europe". After an IRA bomb destroyed the centre's western end in June
1996, Mancunians waited a decent interval before lamenting that the
bombers hadn't parked their car at the other end of Market Street, which
might have destroyed the whole building. Now the entire Arndale has been
redeveloped and expanded. Covering 1.4 million square feet of retail
space, it is the largest urban shopping centre in Britain.
cont'd....
http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120029