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Why Leeds Trinity scheme is important to city
Rod McPhee found out why the Trinity scheme is so crucial to Leeds and why they won't do to the city what developers did to the heart of Bradford
A recent economic report concluded there were three pivotal projects for the Leeds economy: the arena, the expansion of Leeds/Bradford airport and the construction of a shopping centre.
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The latter's inclusion may be something of a surprise, but then the scheme the Audit Commission study specifically referred to was Trinity, which is much more than your average shopping centre.
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Since April 2009, when the recession brought building work on the site to a halt, the development has come to represent the wider fortunes of Leeds.
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In theory, the turnaround of this 650m project would hail the start of a revival for the entire city.
And here it is: 12 months later and the company has confirmed they will
move back on site before the end of the year and are sticking to their revised target date of opening in autumn, 2012.
It's a move which has helped neutralise fears that Leeds would be another Bradford, where half the city centre was flattened to make way for a new 320m Westfield shopping centre.
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Six years after the bulldozers first moved in, a vast desert now languishes where a gleaming retail complex should now be standing.
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But even though the original opening date for Trinity was earmarked as later this year, Gerald Jennings, Land Securities' portfolio director for the North and Scotland, insists we won't suffer the same fate.
"I will be as categoric as I can be: We will not leave a hole in the middle of Leeds." he says. "The ambition is to be open in time for Christmas trading in 2012 and to achieve that target we need to be starting work some time this year.
"But we'd be wrong to commit to a specific date because then we become a hostage to fortune and, given the fragility of the economy, who knows what next week will bring. But just to be clear: to be built by 2012 we need to be on-site in 2010."
That Trinity is important, there is no doubt. By 2013 the market potential of Leeds could be a whopping 2.08 billion a year – that's a rise in current consumer spending of 20 per cent.
That will see Leeds nudge ahead of Manchester, making us the second biggest shopping destination of any English city outside of London. Only Birmingham will be bigger.
But that also depends on the construction of the 800m Eastgate Quarter project – which, sadly, was further postponed by developers in an announcement last month. So what makes Trinity's developers such a safe bet?
Firstly, Land Securities now own the Leeds Shopping Plaza between Albion Street and Commercial Street. This will eventually form some 20 to 30 per cent of the floor space of the entire development. And since this already includes big existing retailers like H&M and Boots, they have an instant advantage.
Then there's the track record of Land Securities who are among the premier league of colossal companies able to access bank funding with the ease that lesser corporations can only dream of."When you're a business worth 6 or 7 billion" says Gerald "You're not merely 'as good as your last project' you simply have a different conversation with the financial community."
Furthermore, Land Securities have serious form in creating huge retail success stories. As well as Leeds's existing White Rose Shopping Centre they created Cabot Circus in Bristol and Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow. They also jointly developed the new showpiece Bull Ring Shopping Centre in Birmingham.
Notably, most of the above have not only added to the centres of whichever city they were built in, they've formed an intrinsic part of their rejuvenation.
Land Securities, now the biggest property company in Europe, has a long history in this field. Developed in 1944 by Harold Samuel (later Lord Samuel) the company bought up post-war bomb sites in numerous blitzed towns and cities and helped rebuild the central shopping precincts.
Interestingly Samuel is said to be the man who originally coined the phrase "Location, Location, Location" – an acknowledgement not lost on those keen to see the development of Trinity in such a prime Leeds address.
With so much on their side it seems hard to believe Land Securities
couldn't have ridden out the recession and pressed ahead with the hope of opening in a more favourable economic climate.
"Back in 2008, when things started to look bad in the market, we could have just thrown something up," says Jennings. "We could have let the scheme out to anyone and in doing so compromised on the quality of tenants and the finished product.
"We wouldn't have spent as much money, erected any old building, then sold it onto someone else and banked ourselves a nice five million quid or so. But that's not what Land Securities are about. We are all about the long term.
"We didn't want to just build 'a shopping centre' – we don't even call it that. We were very clear about what we were developing and we wanted to develop something different and special.
"Your conventional 'shopping centre' can often be like a spaceship that just lands in, or close to, towns and cities and are very inward facing. They're disconnected with everything else. One of the lessons we've learned, even just in the last 10 to 15 years, is that they needn't be that way."
To some degree Trinity have drawn inspiration from the jewel in Leeds's retail crown: the Victoria Quarter, which manages to balance the concentration of a shopping centre with a natural continuation of the streetscape.
With that in mind the architects have come up with a design which puts a glass roof over the main shopping area protecting visitors from the worst of the elements without creating a sense that they're cut off from the outside world.
But they're taking things a step further. The now demolished Burton and Trinity arcades, opened in 1973, wiped out an important chunk of the grid system which used to exist between Commercial Street, Albion Street, Boar Lane and Briggate. Some of these roads will effectively be replaced – turning the cityscape back some 40 years to a time when this huge block of Leeds city centre was more open and joined up.
Most importantly Land Securities will install a mix of retail and leisure which extends beyond the normal trading hours, meaning the new 'streets' will be open way beyond the conventional 9 to 5. The aim is to link into the local nighttime economy and, of course, the weekday population of around 100,000 office workers (not to mention the estimated 6,000 city living dwellers) who still want to eat, drink and shop once they've finished work.
But cynicism surrounding big companies with big ideas is likely to remain. After all, the 'new' Corn Exchange and Clarence Dock were both mooted as valuable retail additions to Leeds and both so far have failed to live up to expectations.
Jennings insists the developers of the Corn Exchange were just unlucky, embarking on a big project just as the financial climate turned. As for Clarence Dock: "We have the advantage over a scheme like Clarence Dock because of sheer scale. We can accommodate a large anchor store, but it's also having a quantity and quality that attracts the volume of footfall you need.
"If you have a relatively small scheme with relatively small space you will almost inevitably not get enough visitors to survive, unless of course they're retailers which are so iconic that people will travel to visit them."
As yet Land Securities haven't quite got the iconic names – in fact they're reluctant to say just how much of the main development has been let due to "commercial sensitivity".
But last month they confirmed that Next, another safe bet, will open a new store in Trinity double the size of their existing one on Albion Street. They also have the unusual Everyman boutique cinema (the first in the north of England) which is sure to draw in satellite leisure facilities.
They are the only two confirmed signings to date, but Jennings says they are in talks with various American and European names, many of whom will be entirely new to Leeds if not to the UK.
"We're conscious of the dangers of merely creating 'clone towns', which is a term which is much talked about where you get the same retailers with almost identical shops making every high street look the same." says Jennings.
"We need to make sure we don't go entirely down that route but at the same time Trinity does need household names like Next to pull people in and to create flagship outlets. Why should people in Leeds have to travel to the Metro Centre or Meadowhall to access the biggest stores?
"And, on top of that, we're also having a conversation with retailers about what they're going to do with the space we let to them. How will it look? What can they do to make it different? More appealing? This is just another example of why we've had to take more time and make more effort in the development of Trinity."
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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