Prior to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire, paved the way for Byzantine/Roman collapse by erecting a fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus Straights with a view to strangling the trade of Constantinople and to deter military reinforcements from any number of Italian city state trading ports dotted around the Black Sea.
Pretty clever – once you interfere with the trade of a place then it upsets the great and the good as well as the plebs; it’s bad for morale, bad for the coffers and bad for supply.
Aside from the guns and mercenary garrisons, this strategy is in many way like the local council strategies for economic ‘development’ of local towns in Northern Ireland – as in while a fortress and garrison makes sense, Mehmed the Conqueror may well have visited similarly disastrous economic effects upon Byzantium’s city simply by building a retail park with a massive Asda, a B&Q, a petrol station and a Tim Horton’s, especially if he charged lower business rates than car-unfriendly Constantinople.
I say this because I cannot escape the correlation (or perception, as it’s a personal observation) between struggling town centres and their relative proximity to peripheral retail parks or even just large supermarkets that are outside of convenient walking distance from the local high street.
In my childhood we would often head to Cookstown for shopping.
Fast forward decades into the future and we find that, aside from a family function in the Royal in the mid noughties neither I, nor any of my family have spent a penny in Cookstown’s main street area since the retail parks and Asda were built.
We go straight to Asda or the retail-park and then flit.
I extrapolate (assume) that this is the case for many people – it’s simply the path of least resistance.
In Newtownards, the street closest to the retail park is quite derelict. Ballymena, though much improved in recent years, cannot be said to be bouncing’. Newry is a mindboggling mess given all the blessings that it has at its disposal. Lisburn has loads of commercial properties for rent (literally dozens). Antrim, like Newry, is well below par given the town’s aspects (literally a Georgian high street alongside a river, running into a Barbican gated Loughside castle forest park) – yet it looks forlorn.
Feel free to insert other underwhelming towns, I was going to add Coleraine and Larne but in all honesty I can’t remember their commercial state of health or their retail park/out-of-town-supermarket status.
Anyhoo, what they have in common is that they all, like Cookstown, have retail parks and mega supermarkets tacked on just ever so mildly inconveniently away from the town centre
So, several counter examples with opposite results spring to mind:
Firstly, Magherafelt – the expansion of the Lidl there and the adjacent retail park are relatively new additions to the town. The town has a modest Tesco (a former Crazy Prices/Supervalu) out a wee bit, but not up there with Mehmed the Conqueror’s Straight-Cutter (Asda/Super Tesco)
But it does have a supermarket right in the town (JC Stewart’s) and a shopping centre that is joined to the town via a string of shops skirting the car park – i.e. the shopping centre is not an island like the supermarkets of Newry or Cookstown or Sprucefield so people can and do go to other shops once they’re done with the supermarket/shopping centre.
Antrim I believe used to have a Tesco in the Castle centre which was close to the town, but, no more – now the Tesco is beyond the convenient sweet spot for pedestrians.
Secondly, Ballycastle has (at a glance) 1 business for rent and maybe one shop for sale.
Ballycastle does not have a retail park nor a hypermarket, only a big Co-Op/Spar type thing.
Thirdly, the Netherlands – it is my observation that the peripheral hypermarket is rare – most towns have a supermarket bang in the town centre which means people can walk from the supermarket to adjacent shops and cafes, like Magherafelt and indeed Kilkeel whose Asda spills out onto a street (and to a lesser extent Ballymoney with her town centre tesco).
Neigbouring Belgium by contrast has our model of supermarkets and retail parks further away from the town centre – lo and behold many smaller Belgian towns are dumps.
Now for the (I hope) interesting part;
Downpatrick fell into the former category of town-und-retail-carbuncle and had 3 underperforming streets practically (Irish St was so-so, English street bereft of commercial activity, St Patrick’s Ave was quite full, and Scotch St practically abandoned ( to the point that even some councillors wanted to overturn conservation regulations in order to permit the conversion of shops into flats)
Yet, since the flood that took out the retail park Downpatrick has seen many if not most of Market street’s shops reopen; St Patrick’s Avenue is almost full and Scotch St only now has two units not undergoing commercial renovation – one of which is an ill-kempt derelict building (the council provides free paint, so there’s no excuse…) and the other is for currently for sale.
Furthermore 2 charity shops have closed – charity shops are a metric for a town’s economic health (i.e. the more the less merry), even more odd is that one of the charity shops has been replaced with a new shoe shop.
Two new cafes have opened with the rumour of another 2 in the pipeline.
Is it really a coincidence that since the retail park (10 – 15min walk) was hobbled that some shops in DP saw an uptake in commercial traffic?
While it’s far from being vibrant it is nonetheless reviving in an unforseen way.
If this link can be proven, then should the council not bar the reconstruction of the retail park and impending mega-Asda and compel Asda to move into the smaller semi derelict shopping centre (which has a massive car park btw)?
The proposed mega Asda would entail an eatery (and no doubt shoes) – there’d be no reason to pop into Downpatrick whatsoever – one could obtain practically all necessary items there – from sausages to shirts to shoes to shovels, and then have a meal/coffee there too, no need to bimble into town.
It would become like Cookstown (again).
If Magherafelt is anything to go by then if Asda were moved to the town centre then people would bimble from Asda to the other local shops and cafes and contribute to the town’s health as opposed to being a rival in the form of middle-ages economic strategic warfare as employed by Mehmed II.
Is there conclusive proof yet that these malls and retail complexes harm existing town centres? If so, surely it’s time for a rethink regarding their planning permission status and whether they are a good idea at all?
If you know of any more examples of this or indeed counter examples defying these observations then please note them below (e.g. what’s it like in Bangor? It has large retail parks but I’ve no idea what the town centre is like these days).
NOTE: Magherafelt district council rejected numerous applications for out of town supermarkets and it looks like she is reaping the rewards – but now she is under the heel of Mid-Ulster District council who demonstrably has no qualms about out of town supermarkets and retail parks, and, since this change in management the retail park on the Castledawson road grows yearly. Will there be a tipping point?
Found way down the food chain, a ‘middle of the road’ creature that is attacked by creatures from either side of the political jungle, from the bottom feeding ‘Republicanus hypocriticus’ better known as the ‘common shinner’ to the chameleonic ‘Unionisus opportunitisticus’, better known as a ‘Dooper’.
Known to feed on single celled organisms such as ‘Rangerophilus fanus’ and ‘neque Deditionem’ better known as ‘no surrenders’ and occasionally surfacing during rutting season to lock horns with ‘MOPEus Eternus’, better known by their moniker ‘MOPEs’.
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
