It is no secret that the UK’s high streets and shopping centres are suffering right now with many stores shutting shop.
WH Smith, a staple of UK town centres, is set to become the latest chain to disappear from high streets after being sold for £76 million.
Modella Capital, its new owner, has said it will keep the Post Office outlets that operate in many branches, but will rebrand the high street chain as TGJones.
The rebranding will mark the end of an era, with the household name WH Smith eventually vanishing from UK high streets.
The Festival Park shopping centre in Ebbw Vale, Wales, has faced a similar fate.
The shopping centre, which is almost a microcosm for the state of our high street right now, has been unused for several years and right at the end, only one Sports Direct shop remained.
Other big brand names that left the park included M&S, Nike, Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Costa and Gap.
Opened in 1992 for £18million by then Prince Charles, Dannii Minogue and Catherine Zeta Jones, the centre is a shadow of its former self.
The shopping centre was originally built with taxpayers money as part of the Conservative government’s national garden festivals, which involved developing derelict land in struggling areas.
It was sold to Mercia Real Estate Ltd in 2021 and there are now plans to transform the site into an industrial park.
It is the job of property consultancy Knight Frank to attract tenants to the completed centre.
The new site is set to include a gym operator and a nursery for the occupiers of the units and residents in the area.
Neil Francis, head of Knight Frank’s industrial and logistics division in Wales, said: ‘The imaginative redevelopment of the Festival Park site, coupled with a willingness by the owners to be able to agree leases within a matter of weeks, will be an attractive proposition to local and national businesses.’
Samuel Clark, chief executive officer of Mercia Real Estate, added: ‘We are confident that the much-needed redevelopment of Festival Park will be an attractive proposition to new and existing businesses, and will provide a range of unit sizes to enable successful small businesses to expand over time without ever needing to leave the site to find larger premises.’
At the time of the shopping centre closure, shopper Megan Woods, 59, said: ‘It was amazing then – long queues to get in and a real buzz. It has its own fairground and even a talking moving clock. But now it is more like a zombie-land with no one here.
‘Something has gone very wrong somewhere that all that investment of taxpayers money was wasted. It was getting bad before the pandemic but now it is just ridiculous.’
Locals blamed lack of investment and planning.
Shop owner Kim Maguire moved out of the shopping centre to the high street – even though her John Jenkins gift shop was one of the original stores on the site.
She said: ‘I still regularly hear from customers about how much they miss Festival Park though, and how shocked they all are at what has happened to it over the last few years.
‘It still feels quite surreal to be honest, even now a year down the line.
‘It was a sad day when it closed for me as a business and for the community as a whole. Everyone who worked there misses it as well, though we are now in a larger shop further towards the centre of town.’
Kelvin Morgan once ran a fresh fruit and veg shop at the centre and said: ‘It used to be so beautiful over there with all the flower gardens and shops so to see it as it is now is very sad.
‘I even remember the excitement when it opened as the Garden Festival, and you used to have hundreds of people over there when it first changed to a shopping centre after that.’
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