Broadmarsh: back to the future?

The long-running saga of the revamp of Broadmarsh has been like the elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about the future of Nottingham city centre.

An entire quarter of the city - that great swathe from the sandstone cliff that supports the Lace Market down to the Midland Railway Station - has been in limbo while we waited for a £700m project to go ahead.

It now looks like that eight-year wait was in vain. And the face that the city presents to people walking in from the railway station hasn't got any prettier.

That's not the fault of Westfield, Broadmarsh's developer - like everyone else, its plans have been overtaken by the hangover from the credit crunch.

Banks won't lend the hundreds of millions needed to carry out major retail developments, retailers won't pay rents unless their sales are healthy enough, shoppers have put their credit cards away.

You don't need to be an economist to realise that Broadmarsh isn't going to be turned into a 1.2 million square foot uber-mall anytime soon.

But if that doesn't happen, what will? This is a big question - we're talking about the future of a huge chunk of the city centre and Nottingham's reputation as a retail destination of national standing.

What will happen to begin with is the latest stage in the work Westfield has been doing to keep the existing centre ticking over. It brought in new retailers by giving the run down to the main entrance a fresh face, and I've been told it plans to spend a useful chunk of money giving the main internal square a comprehensive makeover.

It is in talks with a couple of upmarket retailers - one in fashion, the other home technology - about taking some of the substantially refreshed space. There are also plans to revamp the entrance area near Bridlesmith Gate.

This is only a holding operation, though. The real debate is about the long-term.

Nottingham City Council no longer wants anything resembling a traditional big mall. It has seen what has happened in Derby (and to a lesser extent in Leicester) and doesn't want a standalone colossus which simply sucks the life out of other parts of the city. Neither does it want one concrete mass swapped for another.

What it wants instead is something which waves goodbye to the era of these retail bomb blasts and recreates shopping streets on a human scale.

What would it look like? Several other cities have already gone down a similar path, with one of the frontrunners being Liverpool ONE [pictured above], a development which is all about opens streets rather than covered malls and has a grassed open space at its heart.
Difficult though it is to believe when you look at the concrete brutality of Broadmarsh, Colin Street and Middle Hill, there were once simple streets here.
Bringing them back to life, one by one, may be the smartest, most cost-effective and most sympathetic way for Nottingham to take retail back to a new era.