Stores and shopping centres that fail to take a critical look at themselves and evolve with industry trends are doomed.

Stores and shopping centres that fail to take a critical look at themselves and evolve with industry trends are doomed.

“Everything is capable of renewal, it’s just that the longer things are left, the more difficult this process becomes”

John Ryan, stores editor

It’s a decade and a half since Bluewater, the shopping centre in a chalk pit just south of the estuarial part of the Thames, opened. That’s a long time in any walk of life, but in retail it’s the sort of timespan that can see empires rise and fall, personalities appear and disappear and shopping centres fall out of favour.

Yet a quick walk around this Kentish commercial behemoth on Friday revealed the fact that the car parks were close to bursting, there were plenty of shopping bags being carried around the mall and most of the mid-market shops looked busy. The point perhaps about Bluewater and others that have been around a while, think Meadowhall, is their ability and their tenants’ capacity to examine what they are doing and when required to reinvent themselves.

Superficially, this is a mall that looks pretty much the same as it did when it opened in the final year of the last century, but internally the retail mix and even the appearance of some of the longest serving tenants has changed almost beyond recognition. Take Marks & Spencer. This was one of the first stores on that retailer’s portfolio to be given a revamp. This meant opening things up, making the escalators yellow and boosting the store’s credentials as a place to buy food. That was the middle of the 2000s however and now the store appears to have become something of a test-bed for new ideas for the retailer, from digital assistance when selling shoes to, most recently, a new look for its menswear offer.

Bluewater remains a destination notable as much for creating an environment in which change is a constant as for the efforts of those that choose to take space within it. It helps, of course, that the raw material was pretty good to start with and that when it opened this was a major piece of inward investment by an Aussie shopping centre developer. That said, everything ages and the ability to renew is what keeps shoppers coming back.

And the positive in all of this is that everything is capable of renewal, it’s just that the longer things are left, the more difficult this process becomes – think Woolworths, Comet or even Barretts. All of these had large numbers of stores that were unloved and all of them had bought new formats to market just before they went under. Alas, too little too late. Keeping on top of store interiors and, for that matter, malls, should be an essential part of good shopkeeping.