The new Debenhams at Bury St Edmunds is a striking piece of contemporary architecture but, John Ryan asks, does it work as a store – and is its location right?

It’s the year of anniversaries. Marks & Spencer is 125, Sainsbury’s is busy flagging up its 140th and Selfridges has reached its centenary. And by the time you get sight of this, Debenhams in Bury St Edmunds will just have passed the three-months mark.

And congratulations to the latter are surely in order for keeping quiet about what is such a highly unusual building for as long as this. Indeed, it might be worth assessing this 60,000 sq ft, three-floor store in the context of the rash of metal gonad-shaped buildings that have appeared in the UK over the past decade.

Things kicked off in 2002 when Ken Livingstone and the London Assembly moved into the striking, rounded, glass building on London’s South Bank.

A year later, Selfridges unveiled itsBirmingham “blob” (as some commentators dubbed it), the multi-floor department store with a futuristic space-age exoskeleton. This too was spherical and now, in 2009, we have Debenhams in Bury St Edmunds.

In terms of scale, this is clearly a rather different proposition from what has been seen in London or Birmingham, but in one respect it is more radical than either of its predecessors. Bury St Edmunds is a venerable Suffolk market town, complete with traditional market square, cathedral and a large entry in the Magna Carta. As such, it is not the first place you might associate with a building of the kind that has been created by Hopkins Architects and its arrival has not been without its detractors.

Store manager Katy Tamagni says that one shopper christened it “The Marmite building” – “you either love it or hate it”. The Hopkins version of events is that it is intended to look like a clamshell – but a closer approximation might be a tessellated version of the helmet worn in that 1980s future of law enforcement epic Robocop.

Tamagni is quick to point out that trade to date has been ahead of expectations:  “Whatever they think, they like what they see when they get inside,” she says.

Staying on the outside for a moment,  though, it is worth noting the care that has been taken to create the store’s unusual form. Debenhams in Bury St Edmunds  is part of a scheme called the Arc, a Centros development that has been revealing new tenants bit by bit since it opened earlier this year.

Like the Debenhams store, the £105m Arc is uncompromisingly modern in aspect and recent additions have included Fat Face, Animal and, last week, HMV. However, it is the department store that takes the design laurels, whatever you might think of it. The top part of its external facade is entirely cosmetic, with the metal plates used to clad the structure continuing four rows higher than the building itself in order to complete its curvilinear form.

This at least means that interior space has not been sacrificed to accommodate the exterior shape. But it does mean that other than the two main entrances, there are few opportunities for showing off what’s inside – there just aren’t many windows – and the overriding impression is of curving metal surface rather than shop. 

However, step inside and much of what is on show is familiar. Debenhams creative director Mark Woods says that the Bury St Edmunds store is an attempt to take the lessons learnt from the large-footprint branch that opened at Westfield London at the end of October last year and apply this to a store around half the size.

The first thing that a visitor is likely to encounter at the store in its current incarnation is what Debenhams calls a “CV”. For most people, what a store with a career resume at the entrance would look like would be unclear, but in Debenhams speak a CV turns out to be a “customer visual”. Which is another way of saying that a group of (distinctly busty) bronze-coloured bathing beauties await the visitor just inside the store entrance. One of these reclines on a high-gloss black table, forming the entrée for a summer shop. It looked a tad optimistic on the overcast and rainy day of visiting, but nonetheless is standard stuff, alongside the equally prime space given to the beauty and cosmetics area as customers’ thoughts turn to palm-fringed beaches during summer’s onset.

That aside, the bulk of this floor is markedly out of the ordinary, as it is home to menswear – a category banished to the basement in most stores of this type. The reason for this is probably that it allows the basement to be devoted, in its entirety, to womenswear, giving the largest department the lion’s share of the available space. Cunningly, given the relatively narrow store entrance, Woods and his team have succeeded in giving frontage to beauty, menswear and the holiday shop. Tamagni points to the Benefit and Bare Minerals concessions in the beauty area, noting that they are unique to Debenhams within Bury St Edmunds.

The men’s department benefits from pillars clad in dark wood tones, striking a masculine note, while at the far end of the floor is a shoe department that Tamagni claims is the largest “non-branded” example of its kind within the Debenhams portfolio.

Downstairs, all is predictably glossy with the Designers at Debenhams – Julien MacDonald, Jasper Conran, John Rocha et al – being given the usual run-out in terms of shopfit. And the now familiar cream-tiled walkway is used to take shoppers past the various merchandise islands.

On the first floor it’s childrenswear, homewares and a 2,000 sq ft cafe with a white-tiled serving area. The walls separating the cafe from the rest of the floor have been adorned with framed graphics exhorting shoppers to eat well with messages such as “Non-GM”, “Healthier kids meals” and “Free-range eggs”. This is fine in itself, but a little curious in light of the queuing systems for the cash desks on each floor. These are lined with row after row of mid-price confectionery – waiting, presumably, to be snapped up by shoppers who have just eaten healthily in the cafe.

On the day of visiting Debenhams was running one of its 20 per cent off promotions and seemed to be having some success in pulling shoppers in from the rain. But the question that has to be asked is whether Bury St Edmunds might have been better served if the empty retail units in the middle of the historic town, including a substantial former Woolworths, were now filled with the retailers that occupy the Arc. This is certainly a good-looking open-air development, but really adds little to the town that could not have been contained within existing retail premises. The Arc’s genesis obviously predates the current financial crisis, but you still have to ask whether it was needed.

Internally, the Debenhams store is a good example of the retailer carrying the store design promise of the Westfield London and Liverpool stores more widely across its estate. Externally, however, the store is questionable; despite its impressive structure it seems not to function terribly well as a building for a store or as an appropriate addition to a predominantly medieval town.

Debenhams, Bury St Edmunds

  • Location Arc shopping development
  • Store size 60,000 sq ft over three floors
  • Architecture Hopkins Architects
  • Store form Metal tessellated gonad
  • Arc centre development cost £105m