Go karts, penguins and Flannels: Liverpool attempts to lure shoppers away from Amazon
'Predict what's going to happen next on the high street at your peril'
By David Lloyd
In ten years’ time, I confidently predict, local radio will be dead and the Radio City Tower will have been recommissioned as the UK’s highest indoor skydiving centre. I challenge you to bet against it. Just as I challenged my friends to bet against my prediction — ten years ago — that Debenhams will have gone bust and its Liverpool ONE site will be home to a 100,000 square foot, split-level go-kart track.
Sadly, I forgot to place that bet. If I had, I probably wouldn’t need to be writing this at all. But the fact remains: predict what’s going to happen next on the high street at your peril. Unless you’re Mary Portas. And even then, you’d be as well to listen to Mystic Meg: “Philip Green of Knightsbridge, the pension fund is in a suitcase in your yacht”.
And yet, predicting the ebb and flow of the high street is exactly what property group Grosvenor did when it ploughed £1 billion into its Liverpool ONE masterplan back in 2008.
But where are we now? With the ‘terminal decline’ of the department store, the post-Covid reluctance to return to the office, a cost of living crisis and my continuing war of attrition with the women at the Clarins Skin Spa in John Lewis, the high street is having a torrid time of it.
Despite the lurid headlines, Liverpool may well be fighting back. But as Church Street’s star player is nabbed outside the transfer window by the galácticos of shopping centres, Liverpool ONE, is the fight about to get ugly? And if so, whose side are you on?
For the best part of a century, Marks and Spencer was the anchor store for Liverpool ZERO. Its home? Compton House — the world’s first purpose-built department store (that, ahem, was actually burned down by a Victorian scally and rebuilt). The same store that, according to Liverpool ONE, formed a vital link between it and the rest of the city: the third point in the Liverpool’s triangle of anchor stores: Debenhams, John Lewis and M&S.
Back then, Ayo Daramola-Martin, Grosvenor’s Marketing Director told me how “M&S’s position, looking directly into the new Church Yard arcade, couldn’t be more perfect for the city and for us.”
Turns out it could have been more perfect. It could be in Liverpool ONE. Because, in what looks like an act of friendly fire, Liverpool ONE has made M&S an offer that the retailer has found hard to resist. It’ll be leaving Compton House to move into the Debenhams site, shacking up with those speeding go-karts in spring next year. Cue a city-wide clutching of pearls. How could this be? Things aren’t supposed to move. Not here. Not when it’s in The World’s First Purpose-Built Department Store. Surely to St Michael this is an act of High Street high treason?
At first glance, it is perplexing. Just a decade or so ago, M&S invested £3 million on its Church Street site, increasing its floor space by 40%, and it spent a further £10 million adding new retail units to the Williamson Square elevation. Units which have remained stubbornly empty since Stoniers was kicked into the street; broken china and all.
M&S can move wherever it likes. It’s entirely possible that the move towards the river is the opening gambit in the store’s sailing out of the city for good. It’s made no secret of its belief that town centres have ‘lost impetus’ and of its plan to move more of its shops to edge-of-city food halls, and focus more on selling its knickers online. This may well be a case of Liverpool ONE winning the battle; but the war definitely rumbles on.
“We shouldn’t get hung up on anchor stores or where they are,” says Liverpool ONE’s Donna Howitt. “The fact is, they’ve decided to stay in the city, saving all those jobs.”
Howitt has a point. Liverpool ONE has saved — and introduced — thousands of jobs. Not to mention visitors and brands previously sniffy about the very idea of being seen on our high street. Its masterplan, unveiled during our Capital of Culture year is still, for the most part, masterly. The green expanse of Chavasse Park, its insistence on commissioning a raft of different architects to give the scheme a defiantly anti-Trafford Centre aesthetic, and the way it connects to the waterfront. Tick, tick, tick.
Footfall, spending and rental incomes are up, too. Although whether M&S will be paying any is a moot point. There must be a sweetener involved to make them wheel all those clothes racks up Lord Street. I wouldn’t do it for free. But how long will they stay in this easy-in, easy-out new home, once they sell their Compton Street block?
Howitt, at least, is wise enough not to make predictions. She’s been at the helm while many of the previous ones fell. A solitary restaurant terrace simply wasn’t enough to accommodate the boom in casual dining — now accounting for almost double L1’s original offer; and huge tenants such as Stockton’s furniture showroom and the HMV megastore soon fell victim to changing retail trends. Then there was Debenhams.
Howitt remains sanguine about it: “Things evolve. Nothing stays still. Even the term ‘high street’ seems outdated now,” she says. “It conjures up images of the 1950s, when now it’s a place where people work, shop, live and eat.”
But what of that connectedness to the rest of the city? It’s hard not to hear those gears changing abruptly as you move from Paradise Street to the bottom of Lord Street, and the bird shit-splattered edifice of HSBC bank. You’d hear it more clearly if the buskers, preachers, Muppet orchestras and men upside down in a bucket singing ‘Love Me Do’ through an Argos amplifier would turn it down a notch or two.
“The things you see, we see too. But if they were easy to fix, they’d be fixed by now,” Donna says. “Can we do more? Yes. But what’s come out of Covid is a willingness for everyone to work together better. A thriving city centre benefits all of us.”
I was thinking of contacting a retail analyst for this piece. If only so I could play a game of high street-jargon bingo, and tick off the boxes every time they said experiential, activation, green spaces or dwell time. But ultimately, I knew it would be pointless, because we can all sing that tune by heart. No one sang it more loudly than Debenhams when it relaunched in 2017, promising to become a ‘destination for social shopping’ and a ‘leisure experience’ fit for the future. That went well.
Stripped of the buzz words these analysts charge £500 an hour for, the question remains: When they talk of ‘diverse town centre which can satisfy changing customers’ needs’ what do they mean? Like, really?
For me, the words conjure up images of those majestic ladies in Lewis’s food hall. Coiffured goddesses of their island kingdoms. Little atolls of loose biscuits, hand-carved hams and Cadbury’s mis-shapes.
It brings to mind the fabulous tableaux of Blackler’s grottos. Of spending the afternoon bashing out Chariots of Fire on a stash of synths, all free to play at George Henry Lee’s music department. Or of watching shoppers held in thrall by the magical properties of a wok, demonstrated in the arse end of Woolworths. I can’t recall what the magical properties were, exactly, as I was busily pilfering bonbons in the pick and mix while my mum’s head was turned by a nasi goreng.
Experiential shopping. Haven’t we been here before?
And what of it now? Flash Mobs of LIPA students doing a Gok Wan catwalk? Flat-packed German markets, defrosting their bratwursts, straight from a cold storage unit in Burnley? Circle shows of Britain’s Got Talent rejects, tripping up shoppers trying to get into Primark, while they break-dance to “House of Pain”, while wearing oversized Princess Diana and Piers Morgan masks?
Still, I guess one person’s ‘experiential’ is another’s absolute waking nightmare. Maybe the unholy alliance of go-karts and M&S knickers really is the answer. Only time will tell.
There is, in a council storage room somewhere in the city, a very high shelf, bowing under the weight of regeneration programmes, planning documents and public realm consultations. Beautifully bound, painstakingly indexed — and completely unread.
Over the last ten years, our council has made merry with its HP printers, rattling off ream after ream of Local Plans and Spatial Frameworks. I’m still waiting for those pavement cafes and little ‘parklets’ scattered like confetti along a pedestrianised Dale Street. But I’m not holding my breath.
Bill Addy has read them. All of them. As CEO of the Liverpool BID company, which represents the interests of over 1,000 city centre businesses, it figures.
“People worked hard on them, but they’re dead documents gathering dust. Nobody’s doing anything with them.” Worse than that, he says, they actually argue with one another. “There’s conflict and confusion about what the council thinks is actually public realm or not.”
Coming out of Covid, Addy says, he wanted to reset the clock and get a starting position about everything that’s been said about the historic retail core of the city.
He enlisted Paul Kallee-Grover from Ki Partnerships, a city-based consultancy who’ve helped shape the re-animation of the Cavern Walks and the Business District: it’s hard to ignore the reimagination of Castle Street from banker’s alley to bistro-central.
“Liverpool’s retail core radiates out from Williamson Square, and its street pattern hasn’t changed in 300 years,” Addy says. “But what’s interesting is how it connects to every other part of the city so easily…”
Addy rolls out a map of the area in question: its tendrils reach out to the edge of the Ropewalks, Bold Street, St George’s Hall, Liverpool ONE and the tumorous black growth atop of Millennium House. All of Liverpool — the good, the bad and the Signature Living — is connected. If someone sneezes in the Shankly Hotel’s toilets, you’ll feel it in the Bluecoat.
Which is why The Sq, the name given to Ki Partnership’s study, has Williamson Square at the heart of a much bigger square. One that — potentially — could join all the dots. The full report will be released for our scrutiny next month on BID’s website.
Should we be excited? Maybe. At least someone is thinking about it. When was the last time anyone in the council really thought about Williamson Square: apart from when they had to turn off the fountain?
Addy explains that Liverpool continues to migrate towards the river and M&S is just part of that shift, but that we need to put some thought into Lime Street and the historic routes between the Bluecoat and the little streets that run off Williamson Square before it’s too late — echoing Howitt’s belief that a healthy city centre is only as vibrant as its weakest link.
Interestingly, Kallee-Grover believes that M&S relocating could be exactly what the area needed after all.
“For 100 years M&S has been a closed box with artificial light and no interaction with the city outside,” Kallee-Grover says. “Maybe they’ve been a blocker to that site,” he tells me. He explains that they built the units on the back but that they’ve done nothing with them. “They said they were going to open up the back with an arcade connecting it to Church Street but, again, nothing.”
Addy and Kallee-Grover would like to see the building radically transformed: “Punch a light well into it, open it up and add more life to the side streets,” Kallee-Grover says. “At the moment you’re effectively looking at a tunnel, with the blank sides of M&S adding nothing to the little streets that run off Church Street.”
But those little side streets aren’t down and out just yet. As Kallee-Grover says, there are more pavement cafes along Tarleton Street than the whole of Bold Street. Visit any afternoon and the place is thrumming with life. Just like Lime Street was before they razed it from the map. Now it’s a rat run where no one lingers. Lesson learned? Addy hopes so.
“The council effectively ignored the city’s historic retail core when Liverpool ONE opened up.” He explains that as BID, they can only do so much: “We need a city-wide strategy.”
But it’s not just about shopping. Everyman & Playhouse Theatres CEO Mark Da Vanzo wants to build rehearsal spaces in the square and bring that historic building back into the spotlight.
“Why is the square dead when the Playhouse is alive?” asks Kallee-Grover. He points out that the place should be bustling with activity well into the evening. The Bluecoat, too, is keen to open up to the city more. Join the two and a so-called ‘historic route’ bounces back to life.
But hold on a minute; didn’t the Bluecoat want to open up to Liverpool ONE? Isn’t that why they punched a hole through its back end so that shoppers could access the courtyard for a quick coffee after buying trainers at Onitsuka Tiger? Wasn’t that supposed to solve the Bluecoat’s 300-year old problem: that most of us thought it was too posh to enter?
“Yeah, we’re not saying this hasn’t been looked at a thousand times,” Kallee-Grover admits, “But there’s been all these different layers of strategies and reports. This is about looking not just at how things connect to Liverpool ONE, but about how everything connects to everything else.”
The Sq’s ‘one ring to rule them all’ approach talks of rehearsal spaces, tech-hubs and apartments filling the empty floors above street level, of arts spaces, trees and gyms. You can imagine the artists’ impressions now. Ponytailed 30-somethings jogging by with rictus grins, seagulls stealing gelato from giddy children and business-types taking coffee before a day at the hot desk coal-face.
“The city centre is a bit of a free-for-all at the moment,” admits Addy. “We want a free-flowing city centre of course, but it has to be managed. And it starts with the council. We’re supposed to be a UNESCO city of music, but when you hear the deafening racket on Church Street it’s hard to believe it.”
“The council’s new public realm document dismisses Williamson Square completely, saying it doesn’t have a purpose,” Kallee-Grover says. “We beg to differ. There really are a lot of opportunities here. Look at Flannels. It’s not just the most impressive store in the city, but in the whole of the north of England. That, alone, shows that someone believes we have a future.”
Flannels — in the old Owen Owens store — is a department store with restaurants and a gym, bars and boutiques. It’s a store built for shopping, leisure and socialising. It’s a store very much like Owen Owens. Or Lewis’s. A store as a destination in its own right.
But Flannels is built for the Tik-Tok crowd. Lewis’s was for the rest of us. It was the finest store in the north of England. Until we wanted Edge Lane retail park.
Which brings me back to Tarleton Street. I wander down it on a grey and overcast Monday afternoon. Kallee-Grover’s right: the place is alive. From the gelatos of P&D’s Italian deli to the bacon butties of Bramley’s Cafe, people are out, socialising, shopping and using the historic core of the city: much as they did when they deserted the city’s first Liverpool ONE, London Road, and flocked to the cool new shopping hotspot of Church Street in the 1860s to preen, promenade and be seen.
Being a retail analyst, I think, should be as much about looking into the past as looking into the future. Cities have death built into their design. At least, great ones do. Things have to compost down for all that fecundity to be reborn. Sediment moving downstream to be deposited elsewhere.
Grosvenor didn’t start work on Liverpool ONE in 2004. The Luftwaffe started the job for them 60 years before. In time, Liverpool ONE will be flattened and wiped from the map. And we should celebrate that, too.
Local businesses, circular economy, activation and dwell time…right now, on Tarleton Street, I feel sure of something. I’ve found the future of the high street. It’s that holy grail of a place retail analysts call a ‘sticky street’, and not just because of the gum on the cobbles.
Now let’s sit back and see what happens to it.
Anyone fancy placing a bet?
Lovely, mischievous, compelling writing. Brilliant that The Post has space for pieces that are not only timely and topical, but have a unique and memorable voice. Love it!
I love the idea of Marksies having an open space. We need more places just to linger, read a book, relax and feel safe and refreshed, Why don't we look at other successful cities, see what they do and adapt? Vancouver, Melbourne, Singapore