Town centre revamp a return to old habits - expert

The revamp of a town's ageing shopping centre, which will cut retail space and include homes, is a nod to the way town centres were previously organised, an expert said.

Newbury's Kennet Centre will shut its doors for the final time on Saturday before a major redevelopment which will cut its retail space by about two-thirds.

Developer Lochailort Investments' Old Town project, which includes 317 homes, was approved by West Berkshire Council in September after previous plans were rejected.

Retail consultant Graham Soult said the move to a less retail-dominated town centre has been seen previously.

"It's going back a way to how things were before, because if you go back 100 years our town centres were a lot more diverse – it wasn't all retail," he said.

"Post-war our town centres have [had] retail after retail. So in a way they are going back to become those more diverse communities that they were in the past."

Large, older shopping centres like the Kennet Centre gradually became less desirable for major retailers because of their inflexibility, Soult said.

"If you look at these big, sprawling shopping centres built in the 1970s and 1980s, 1990s sometimes, they've reached the end of their life," he added. "They are big, bulky buildings that are hard to maintain and hard to repurpose and retail needs have changed as well.

"In Newbury you've got Parkway [Shopping] that opened in 2011 and Debenhams moved over there. I think that was the beginning of the end of the Kennet Centre because all your big retailers were looking for modern spaces."

Slough, Reading and Maidenhead's shopping centres are all set to undergo major changes.

In Slough, its Queensmere Centre closed earlier this month ahead of a major revamp that will include 1,600 new homes.

In Reading, just over 640 homes will be built at Broad Street Mall, and a major redevelopment of Maidenhead's Nicholson Centre will see about 860 flats in a new-look complex.

Andy Moore, a Newbury town councillor, said he felt a "tinge of sadness" about the closure of the Kennet Centre.

But he said he also felt "that it's something that has done its time, done its service and we are ready to move on".