A FAMOUS shopping centre – once hailed as the largest in Europe – has become mostly barren after decades of neglect.
Shopping City in Runcorn, Cheshire opened in 1972 to much fanfare but now it’s a ghost of its former self with only a few shops making a last stand.
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Shopping City was planned as the dramatic and glitzy centrepiece of the Runcorn’s New Town and was opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
It was ambitious in its futuristic design, had “sky walkways” and was the largest enclosed shopping centre in Europe when its doors opened.
In its heyday, it was hugely popular and visitors travelling far and wide to shop within its glorious 542,000sqft of retail space.
Now, despite attempts to renovate the old beauty, its shoppers see it as tired, old and a little unloved.
Its biggest names have abandoned it over the years, including Woolworths and Littlewoods in the 70s and 80s and The Range and Tesco recently.
Most retailers have shut up shop in the centre leaving it a shell of what it was.
The names of its former shops haunt its empty halls, while signs plead: “Excellent retail space – Make this space your own”.
“A shopping centre with no shops in it,” pointed out Adam Killen, a local barber to Cheshire Live.
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Another shopper, Gail Mayers said, “It’s always been the same. There’s nothing here.”
Nathan Dawson who was out with his young son explained: “It’s behind the times…it’s just stayed in the early 2000s.”
“Everything seems to be developed around Runcorn, but never Runcorn itself,” he added.
“We are quite lucky because we have regulars, but it’s very rare that we see a new face, someone who says ‘Let’s go to Shopping City and see what’s there,” says Magda Spratek manages The Coffee House.
“It would be so much nicer if we had a place like Primark; a big shop to bring people in.”
“I see the same faces so often that I wonder how they can afford to come here all the time,” she added.
Over the years, the centre has tried to encourage more punters with walls adorned with local schoolchildren’s artwork and a pop-up crazy golf course last summer.
“I’ve been working here for twenty years, and it’s the same faces you see coming in every day,” says Rob Garrett, who works in a menswear shop that had stuck it out at Shopping City for over 30 years.
“They’ve tried to do things to get new people in….but I think a lot of people would rather go to Warrington or Widnes now.”
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