Research, cited by car park operator Q-Park, shows that consumer behaviour and emotional responses are significantly influenced by the combined effect of design, colour, texture and lighting. When all four elements are carefully applied in a modern shopping centre, the effect is to create a pleasurable and inviting experience for customers. It therefore makes sense that car parks linked to the centres should be paid as much attention in these areas if they are to generate an equally positive experience.

Q-Park's Tony Tingle says: "Just like moths, people are attracted to brightness, and with car parks still generally thought of as dark, intimidating and gloomy places, clear, bright lighting needs to be top of the list."

Q-Park uses a clever mix of white and blue lighting in its car parks, chosen to create a secure, safe feel as well as giving a stylish, sophisticated look.

Tingle continues: "Colour has a significant influence on people's moods and emotions: white reflects light and is airy and neutral. It also implies freshness and cleanliness. Blue is the purest, coolest and deepest colour of the spectrum and stands for rest, relaxation, sleep, regeneration and communication. It is also thought to decrease blood pressure and heart rate, dissolve nervousness and stress and have a very calming effect on the entire organism."

Q-Park's choice of white lighting is designed to give a natural daylight feel 24 hours a day, with careful positioning ensuring that dark spots are eliminated and the entire car park feels open and safe. The secure feel is enhanced by significant use of glass, particularly in the stairwells and lift lobbies, with blue lighting then used as an accent colour.

The new Liver Street car park in Liverpool has an almost entirely glazed stairwell, with all movement fully visible from outside the building. Blue illumination strips on the underside of the handrails enhance night time visibility, creating a safe, welcoming feel and acting as a striking contemporary design feature in itself.

Tingle adds: "Choices of design, colour, texture and lighting in shopping centres are not random - they derive from painstaking research, particularly into the psychological influences they have on people. Time- and cost-consuming as it may be to integrate these factors into car park design, operators can only benefit from doing so. Ploughing on with delivering the same tired looking dingy car parks that alienate and intimidate customers long before they have stepped into the shopping centre can only result in loss of business and eventually their contracts."

Meadowhall may not have introduced coloured light as yet to its newly renovated multi-storey car parks but it is helping the environment by introducing an energy efficient lighting system.

With the old system all the lights were connected to the same circuits so that if one was on, they were all on. Now, however, the centre has introduced individual solar sensors on all the exterior lighting so that the lights only come on if there is not enough light from the sun.

Technical manager Malcolm McKay says the original plan was that the lights inside the car park would only be switched on if it was dark and gloomy outside, but in fact what they found was that the opposite was needed.

"On a gloomy, rainy day we have more than adequate lighting down here having just half the lighting on," he says. "We have painted the ceiling soffits as well which helps with reflection. On a nice day, however, we found that as you drive in the contrast between inside and outside was too much so we had to reverse the strategy and have all the lights on inside on a nice bright day."

McKay says they are also looking at reducing the lighting even more during quieter times of the week as most cars are parked as close to the centre as possible.

"We are looking at introducing automatic detection where we will look to turn all the lighting off dependent on occupancy.

"But already, the biggest difference we have seen is savings in excess of 40 per cent on energy consumption."

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