New start for Southend
Published: 17 April, 2009
The 335,000-sq ft Victoria shopping centre in Southend, one of the UK’s oldest malls, has just completed a £24m refurbishment that has transformed the 40-year-old scheme. Graham Parker reports
Very few centres have endured four decades without major investment. But the Victoria centre in Southend had been left virtually untouched since Hammerson built it in the late 1960s. It bore all the hallmarks of that era with exposed, windswept malls and brutalist concrete finishes that would have been more at home in Eastern Europe than Eastern England.
A string of owners failed to come up with a viable scheme to refurbish the centre and it was left, somewhat unloved, trapped in a timewarp. The tenant mix reflected this, dominated by value brands and independents.
“It wasn’t even tertiary,” muses Bill Harkness, CEO of Delamere Estates which has transformed the centre in partnership with the National Grid Pension Fund. Prime rents at the time were £40 zone A on the ground floor, and £20 on the upper and lower levels. Compare that with the £100 zone A achievable in the High Street outside the scheme and it was clear that there was plenty of potential for uplift.
Delamere commissioned Benoy to take the centre into the 21st century, and the logical first step was to roof over the vast central space. “It was most important to make it look different,” says Harkness. “Getting the roof on and putting doors at the entrances stopped what we used to call ‘windy city’”.
More radically, it was proposed to reduce the mall from three trading levels to two by filling in the lightwell leading to the basement and creating a single basement-level unit of 46,000 sq ft, which was prelet to Wilkinsons.
The ground floor of the centre has become a focal point for mid-market fashion with the arrival of Next in a 20,000-sq ft unit trading over two floors. “It is a huge shot in the arm for Southend,” says Harkness. “Southend has dramatically changed its image as a retail destination and Next is a fantastic new tenant for the refurbished centre.”
As a measure of the potential in the town, Next achieved three days’ trading during its first day, and footfall in the mall is now up 33 per cent year-on-year at just short of 125,000 a week. This is having clear benefits for other retailers in the centre, and New Look, one of the other fashion anchors, has seen trade grow by 28 per cent since Next opened.
New Look was another key deal in the plan to reposition the Victoria centre. It occupies a 20,000-sq ft two-level store at the High Street entrance – built out into Victoria Circus to create a visual ‘end stop’ to the High Street. And Harkness points to the decision by Peacocks to double its representation in the centre as further evidence of the scheme’s new-found attractiveness to multiple brands.
And in another vote of confidence in the centre HMV took over the Zavvi store when the music retailer collapsed shortly before Christmas.
Harkness won’t disclose the terms of the deals with his anchors, but he says: “All tenants want deals nowadays. And with a pension fund owner we can take a long-term view.”
The letting focus for agent Jones Lang LaSalle is now moving on to the smaller units, between 2,000 and 5,000 sq ft. “Every deal’s a deal, but the tone of rents we’re quoting is around £60 zone A,” says Harkness.
“National Grid is very keen not to fill up the centre with pound shops – they want a fabulous centre with decent tenants,” he explains, conscious that Southend’s downmarket image has deterred some shoppers in the past.
“The town has an incredibly strong catchment but we have to give shoppers a reason to come here. Now it’s about getting more people to consider Southend above places like Lakeside and Basildon.”
And centre director Jonathan Poole is well aware that it’s not just tenant mix that brings about that sort of transformation in shoppers’ perceptions of a centre. Two key new facilities will make the Victoria centre a much more pleasant place to visit. First are the new public toilets, which include several baby changing rooms and a feeding room for mothers and babies with comfortable chairs and subdued lighting. “We’ve got the best loos in town,” Poole says.
And second is Café Society, a coffee shop in the atrium at the entrance to Next. It is operated by a local independent, and Harkness says he chose them above the usual multiple suspects because of the hands-on management they offer.
Accessibility is equally important, and the links between the centre and the adjoining Southend Victoria station have been improved with new escalators feeding travellers straight into the centre. At the same time new bus stands have been built beside the station entrance, creating Southend’s first integrated transport hub.
And before long the mall leading to the station entrance could enjoy the strongest footfall in the centre. Tesco is about to lodge an application for a 90,000 sq ft Extra store right next to the station. The store will be built on stilts above a ground floor car park, and it will link into the Victoria centre at first floor level.
