Half of shopping centres should be demolished or repurposed, says LSH

Nearly half of Britain’s shopping centres should be knocked down or dramatically repurposed. That is the finding of a new report by Lambert Smith Hampton, which estimates that 37% of the country’s shopping centres need reinventing, reducing the number of shops and using the space for flats and offices, as well as adding to their leisure facilities. A further 9% should be demolished. “Shopping centres are big, capital-intensive and very visible projects and, as such, major change is often hard to deliver – but faced with more scrutiny over valuations and the changing dynamics of town centres, owners of shopping centres will increasingly be required to demonstrate vision and boldness,” said Steve Norris, national head of planning, regeneration and infrastructure at LSH. Lambert Smith Hampton analysed the 100 shopping centre deals – valued at about £2.4bn – that have been completed since the start of 2020. Castlegate, in Stockton-on-Tees, is home to what the property agency describes as “arguably the UK’s most radical plan” for repurposing. The complex, where almost half of the shops are empty and which blocks views of the River Tees, is being knocked down and replaced with a riverside market and events space. The derelict Broadmarsh Centre in Nottingham, formerly owned by intu, is set to be gutted, with architects wanting to keep some of the external structure but to add 750 new homes, commercial buildings, a hotel and a park. Lambert Smith Hampton calculated that shopping centres sold in the past two and a half years had been offloaded at an average 58% discount to what the seller had paid. In the “most extreme cases” centres were sold for less than 10% of their previous purchase price. Almost a fifth of all the units in shopping centres are empty. About a third of the vacant space has been empty for at least three years and LSH believed it was “unlikely to ever be filled on commercially viable terms”. The Times (£)