Edinburgh shoppers are flocking to Princes Street following the long-awaited arrival of Primark. John Ryan visits the flagship that has become the city’s retail phenomenon.

A  black hole has opened up mid-way along Edinburgh’s Princes Street. It appeared in December and has been drawing everything close to it irresistibly towards its entrance, frequently leaving the rest of this long thoroughfare uncomfortably empty.

The name given to this phenomenon is Primark and on a cold and rainy Wednesday after the Hogmanay debris had been cleared away, it was doing its bit to keep the rest of the street clean, of shoppers at least.

This is in fact Primark’s first venture into Scotland’s capital, and although there are four of the retailer’s branches in and around Glasgow, until December the closest store to Edinburgh was in Dunfermline – a little more than a stone’s throw away.

Now this clear imbalance has been righted and at one fell swoop Auld Reekie has added Primark’s flagship to the list of retailers resident in the city.

This has been a long time coming. Primark first appeared north of the border in Hamilton in the 1970s and since that time 18 more stores have opened. Edinburgh has long been on the list, according to Tony Slipman, regional controller, but a combination of planning and the right site being unavailable have militated against it making an early appearance.

Size matters

The new store has taken time to appear – work started on it in July 2010 and its construction has involved demolishing the previous structure and building a completely new shop. The outcome is a five-floor, 75,000 sq ft store that ranks fifth, in terms of size, in Primark’s UK portfolio. And although it bears many of the familiar hallmarks that define a Primark store, there is a quite a lot that has been developed for this shop.

In essence, it follows the fit-out that can been seen in the Westfield Stratford branch, but menswear, much of the signage and the building itself do much to break the mould. In terms of build, this is a tricky piece of engineering as the store backs onto a slope with Rose Street, ‘Edinburgh’s longest pub’, backing onto a mezzanine level at the back of the shop.

It is also somewhat out of kilter with much of the rest of what’s along Princes Street in architectural terms. When, however, it is borne in mind that this is a long street where chopping and changing and planning oddities have seemingly been allowed to run riot, perhaps this is not quite as odd as might otherwise appear.

Indeed, as a piece of commercial modernism using coffered vertical panels with wavy lines ascending the face of the exterior, this is one of the better-looking structures along the street.

Internally, there is a lower ground level, aka the basement, which houses menswear and female footwear. This is followed by ground, first and second, which are for womenswear and accessories, while kids and home are at the top of the shop. This is all pretty straightforward, except that owing to the irregular internal geography, the footplate of each floor varies and there are moments when it’s quite hard to work out where you are, although the clear signage does much to mitigate this problem.

One giant leap

Starting therefore on the ‘lower ground’, the menswear department is something of a surprise, even to diehard Primark enthusiasts, owing to the cash-taking area. There is the usual row of supermarket style matt black tills, but in place of a backwall with graphics, there are inset video screens and the whole thing is backed by a false brick wall. Primark’s menswear department has taken a leap towards menswear retailing design best practice. And as the space is in a windowless basement, it also pays a nod to its below stairs location.

Each floor has its own bank of tills, but only the menswear department has brickwork on the wall behind it.

Beyond the tills, at the rear of the floor, the menswear department unfolds – and Primark uses a batch of new fixtures to tempt Edinburgh shoppers into parting with their cash.

Among these, the most eye-catching are those where unfinished wood is used to enliven the displays. Wood cladding and open-sided wooden boxes are used to promote the retailer’s Cedar Wood State brand and to give a sense of the great outdoors. The coupling of this with metal mesh gives an industrial feel that you mightnormally expect of an independent menswear retailer, albeit this does still feel like a chain store.  

There is also a jeans ‘shop’. Primark is nothing if not industrious when it comes to seeing what other retailers are doing and applying best practice across its stores. In this store, ‘jangers’ (jeans hangers that allow a pair of jeans to be hung from their belt loops) are used – something that’s been de rigueur among edgy jeans retailers for a few years now, but which the mass market is really only just beginning to catch up with.

What emerges from the men’s department at Primark in Edinburgh is that this may be the ultimate value merchant, but being such does not mean that it has to look cheap or that low price means an environment that you won’t want to be in.

It is of course fair to relate that visiting a store in January is an entirely different proposition from doing the same thing in the prior month, but even were the space very crowded, it would still be an interesting shop.

The remainder of the floor is filled with women’s shoes, a market segment where Primark continues to vie with New Look for the UK’s volume seller crown. And in spite of an operation that requires constant restocking, the space was well managed and tidy.

Heading up to womenswear on the ground floor, there is little that is actually different from the Stratford store, but it is a measure of the flexibility of Primark’s current fit-out that it can fit readily into two shops with wildly different layouts. The same is true as a progress is made towards the top of the store, although it is worth noting the graphic depicting the store on an Edinburgh street map, as this does serve to localise it.

There is a final showstopper, however and it is on the top floor. Owing to the store’s position, midway along Princes Street, the upper floor has what must be one of the best views of Edinburgh Castle without resorting to scaling the heights of the nearby Scott Memorial. Wisely, Primark has opted to put nothing in the Princes Street-facing window and to provide an unobstructed view of the cityscape. This may detract mildly from the kidswear mannequin display that is immediately in front of it, but the right thing has been done when the temptation might have been to box in the window.

It’s a fine addition to the Scottish capital’s retail provision therefore, and one that has already found favour with shoppers – it’s been a long time coming.

Primark, Edinburgh

Location 91-92 Princes Street, EH2 2ER

Size 75,000 sq ft

Number of floors Five

Store design Dalziel+Pow

Innovation The menswear department