Has Edinburgh went down the cludgie?

[EH11_2NL]

I was in town last Friday for the first time in a long time. Princes Street has certainly taken a dive. When you have a 'Day Today' grocers shop on a street like that, something is wrong. I was sorely disappointed 😞. 

[Rousset1]

Some time ago.

Along with Glasgow, Dumpdee, Inverness and numerous other British cities.

[Dusk_Till_Dawn]

8 minutes ago, EH11_2NL said:

I was in town last Friday for the first time in a long time. Princes Street has certainly taken a dive. When you have a 'Day Today' grocers shop on a street like that, something is wrong. I was sorely disappointed 😞. 

I was there last week and the centre around Princes Street is a ****ing mess tbh. The council are clearly failing in their duties 

[JudyJudyJudy]

9 minutes ago, EH11_2NL said:

I was in town last Friday for the first time in a long time. Princes Street has certainly taken a dive. When you have a 'Day Today' grocers shop on a street like that, something is wrong. I was sorely disappointed 😞. 

They had those type of shops in princes street for decades ! In fact cinema too . 

[heartsfc_fan]

13 minutes ago, EH11_2NL said:

I was in town last Friday for the first time in a long time. Princes Street has certainly taken a dive. When you have a 'Day Today' grocers shop on a street like that, something is wrong. I was sorely disappointed 😞. 

With Debenhams, BHS and Jenner's leaving the street there's very little there now that I'd want to visit.

Heck, Primark for a couple of cheap t-shirts...it's that bad now.

 

The cost of rent/buying a store must be extortionate.

[Tazio]

Well there are a lot more posts than expected before someone uses the word “clowncil” 

[Ministryofdad]

St James quarter is where it's at now. 

 

Princes Street would better off having restaurants and outdoor style dining like george street along with shops. 

I know the jenners is gonna be a hotel is Debenhams going to be another one also?? 

[stirlo]

Princes Street has always suffered a bit from the fact that is one of the only main UK high streets with shops on only one side of the road. The redevelopment of the St James's Centre, Covid and the downturn in high street retail in recent years have all contributed to make the situation worse.

 

But fundamentally there needs to be a plan for Princes Street. Perhaps it should be repurposed as more of a place for bars, restaurants and public spaces. Something definitely needs to be done, because it's not in a good state.

[John Findlay]

It's all good and well blaming the council.

We too, the general public have played our part, by not using what we're known as the better named stores on the street and doing much of our shopping online nowadays.

[Dagger Is Back]

2 minutes ago, John Findlay said:

It's all good and well blaming the council.

We too, the general public have played our part, by not using what we're known as the better named stores on the street and doing much of our shopping online nowadays.

Spot on John. 
 

Have read lots of comments about litter in the streets with people blaming the council for that too. 
 

Easy scapegoats but the fact of the matter is that some people are just clarty, irresponsible and selfish lazy *******s.
 

 

[Zico]

Princes St will mainly be hotels and restaurants in the future but will take a bit of time. Ruby hotel going into old Zara and Next sites. Uniqlo going into the old BHS so retail not completely dead there. 

Edited January 5 by Zico

[Mackem Midlothian]

10 minutes ago, John Findlay said:

It's all good and well blaming the council.

We too, the general public have played our part, by not using what we're known as the better named stores on the street and doing much of our shopping online nowadays.

 

So true.

[John Findlay]

3 minutes ago, Dagger Is Back said:

Spot on John. 
 

Have read lots of comments about litter in the streets with people blaming the council for that too. 
 

Easy scapegoats but the fact of the matter is that some people are just clarty, irresponsible and selfish lazy *******s.
 

 

To true.

[heartsfc_fan]

20 minutes ago, Ministryofdad said:

St James quarter is where it's at now. 

 

Princes Street would better off having restaurants and outdoor style dining like george street along with shops. 

I know the jenners is gonna be a hotel is Debenhams going to be another one also?? 

Would agree with that. Been a few times to St James quarter for shopping, drinks, food, bowling etc. All decent enough and it has parking which is a plus.

[Cade]

Sign of the times.

Everywhere is fecked.

We're still in the grip of the effects of the financial crisis of 2008. The attitude of those running the gaff was "print shitloads of money and get back to doing it the way we did before and maybes it won't all go to bollocks this time". And that was the attitude on both sides of the political divide.

 

Add that to the shift to online shopping and the traditional High Street is knackered.

Even retail parks on the outskirts of cities are dying off.

 

Town centres will become less retail and more service/entertainment industries in the coming years.

Hotels, bars, restaurants and casinos.

 

 

 

Edited January 5 by Cade

[Der Kaiser]

It's definitely a reflection of spending trends and the cost of living.

 

In the last 6 years from an actual physical shop I count a blazer and waistcoat, a shirt, a hoodie and a pair of boots purchased. That's it!

 

Everything else online. Where is the incentive to go Into a shop? If you know all your sizes you (like myself) can comfortably buy everything and know it will fit from sitting on your arse.

 

Now add the cost of living and finding a discount is much easier using your phone than getting a bus or finding a parking space to go and look.

[doddsyJR9]

Virtually everything these days is based on the tv shit show that was Shameless. The Evening News celebrates that there was a queue outside a Charity Shop sale on. I visited Berwick upon Tweed recently and there was a big hue and cry made regarding a Charity Shop being opened in the town high street. Charity shops for goodness sakes. 

 

Princes Street has lost nearly all of its high end stores, replaced by tat and low quality item shops. Its a liberty what has happened to the prime location in all of Scotland.

 

The key to it has of course, coincided with successive anti car authorities being in charge. The parking prices in surrounding streets are exorbitant, and the risk of a parking ticket being found on a car upon return very high. Prince Street, the last time I was there, it was literally awash with council buses. The council has to take the blame for Princes Street's demise. There is no one else to blame.

 

I yearn for the days of a high quality top department store opening, with a visit there an experience, instead of a Charity Shop sale or opening being branded somehow a success. It's nothing short of 'Shameless'.

 

 

[New Town Loafer]

Edinburgh is nowhere near what it once was. This is, however, true of every city in Western Europe. Sadly, it is more noticeable in Edinburgh due to its comparatively small size.

[Dawnrazor]

I'm not sure but is Glasgow city centre in the same state?

I've only really been to Leeds and Manchester city centres over the last few years and both seem to be ok, but big owns are really looking tired around here, Lancaster, Kendal, Skipton are all shadows of themselves, do I presume correctly it's the same UK wide?

[Dagger Is Back]

11 minutes ago, doddsyJR9 said:

Virtually everything these days is based on the tv shit show that was Shameless. The Evening News celebrates that there was a queue outside a Charity Shop sale on. I visited Berwick upon Tweed recently and there was a big hue and cry made regarding a Charity Shop being opened in the town high street. Charity shops for goodness sakes. 

 

Princes Street has lost nearly all of its high end stores, replaced by tat and low quality item shops. Its a liberty what has happened to the prime location in all of Scotland.

 

The key to it has of course, coincided with successive anti car authorities being in charge. The parking prices in surrounding streets are exorbitant, and the risk of a parking ticket being found on a car upon return very high. Prince Street, the last time I was there, it was literally awash with council buses. The council has to take the blame for Princes Street's demise. There is no one else to blame.

 

I yearn for the days of a high quality top department store opening, with a visit there an experience, instead of a Charity Shop sale or opening being branded somehow a success. It's nothing short of 'Shameless'.

 

 

Sorry don't agree at all that there is no one else to blame than the Council.

 

They're a very easy target.

 

Loads of factors have lead to city centre landscapes changing up and down the country. 
 

 

[doddsyJR9]

1 minute ago, Dagger Is Back said:

Sorry don't agree at all that there is no one else to blame than the Council.

 

They're a very easy target.

 

Loads of factors have lead to city centre landscapes changing up and down the country. 
 

 

It is of course your right to disagree with my reasoned opinion, but would you care to list the unsaid factors you refer to, in order to strengthen your disagreeing?

[JudyJudyJudy]

3 minutes ago, doddsyJR9 said:

It is of course your right to disagree with my reasoned opinion, but would you care to list the unsaid factors you refer to, in order to strengthen your disagreeing?

Online shopping ? Out of the centre retail parks?  Huge rents? are just a few i can think of. 

[doddsyJR9]

3 minutes ago, JudyJudyJudy said:

Online shopping ? Out of the centre retail parks?  Huge rents? are just a few i can think of. 

Who or whom control them and that?

[heartgarfunkel]

Edinburgh sorely needing more student accommodation and cheap build flats rammed into every spare square metre without corresponding infrastructure investment. Disgusting that a Victorian brewery in Slateford has been allowed to take up such a real estate footprint for so long. 

[FWJ]

32 minutes ago, doddsyJR9 said:

It is of course your right to disagree with my reasoned opinion, but would you care to list the unsaid factors you refer to, in order to strengthen your disagreeing?

Us.  The public choosing to shop online rather than in city centres.  
Us.  The public choosing to shop in out-of-town aircraft hangers rather than in city centres.

 

And I don’t believe in the “shoppers deserted city centres because they can’t park”.  The glory days of Edinburgh shopping (Binn’s, Small’s, RW Forsyth’s, Jenner’s, Patrick Thomson etc) was before most people had cars.  We got lazy and expected / expect to be able to drive from outside our house to outside where we want to shop.

 

And if the ‘shopping environment’ is poor because of litter - that’s because of us too.  We want to be able to stuff our faces with s***e while we walk down the street and are too lazy to put the associated detritus in a bin.

Edited January 5 by FWJ

[Section Q]

Edinburgh is a dirty run down town.

Very little up keep on it's buildings. 

 

[FWJ]

25 minutes ago, heartgarfunkel said:

Edinburgh sorely needing more student accommodation and cheap build flats rammed into every spare square metre without corresponding infrastructure investment. Disgusting that a Victorian brewery in Slateford has been allowed to take up such a real estate footprint for so long. 

Doesn’t more student flats mean more ‘ordinary’ flats become available for the general public?

[Cade]

4 minutes ago, FWJ said:

Doesn’t more student flats mean more ‘ordinary’ flats become available for the general public?

That's the theory yes.

Students all get crammed into ultra-high density semi-serviced student blocks and this then frees up flats around the city for private let.

Due to them being so high density it's much cheaper to build student flats than "normal" flats.

 

Edited January 5 by Cade

[FWJ]

While Princes Street isn’t what it was, its location and views are unique and lend themselves to its easy repurposing as hotels/restaurants/bars etc

 

Retail vacancy in Edinburgh is much lower than the U.K. average (13% vs 20.3%)

[Ulysses]

1 hour ago, New Town Loafer said:

Edinburgh is nowhere near what it once was. This is, however, true of every city in Western Europe. Sadly, it is more noticeable in Edinburgh due to its comparatively small size.

 

I think it's true of cities in the "Anglo-American" world, but I'm not convinced that it's the same everywhere.  I was in Bilbao last spring, and the kind of "tat shops" and shuttered places you frequently see in Irish and British cities were nowhere to be seen, and the streets were busy with shoppers - some tourists, but mainly locals.  I had a similar experience in late 2022 in Lisbon city centre.  I don't know what economic and cultural factors are at play.  Maybe they shop online a lot less in Spain and Portugal, or maybe it's something else, but I can say that downtown Bilbao was a much more pleasant experience that the city centres of Dublin, Edinburgh or Glasgow.

[trotter]

1 hour ago, John Findlay said:

It's all good and well blaming the council.

We too, the general public have played our part, by not using what we're known as the better named stores on the street and doing much of our shopping online nowadays.

It's not just that John, ECC's hate campaign against drivers has made it almost impossible to drive anywhere in town, even if you can actually get there. That also contributed by forcing people who do like in-person shopping to use the out-of-town retail parks. 

 

I'm sure I heard that the business rates/rents for PS have skyrocketed as well. 

[Ulysses]

1 hour ago, Dawnrazor said:

I'm not sure but is Glasgow city centre in the same state?

 

 

I spent a weekend in Glasgow at the start of December 2022.  Things weren't too bad in that block of shopping streets between the two train stations, but it was worse than (say) 8 to 10 years ago, and some of the streets were ugly to the point of being almost dystopian.

[FWJ]

1 minute ago, trotter said:

It's not just that John, ECC's hate campaign against drivers has made it almost impossible to drive anywhere in town, even if you can actually get there. That also contributed by forcing people who do like in-person shopping to use the out-of-town retail parks. 

 

I'm sure I heard that the business rates/rents for PS have skyrocketed as well. 

How did all the big department stores develop and thrive when hardly anyone had cars?

[FWJ]

1 minute ago, Ulysses said:

 

I spent a weekend in Glasgow at the start of December 2022.  Things weren't too bad in that block of shopping streets between the two train stations, but it was worse than (say) 8 to 10 years ago, and some of the streets were ugly to the point of being almost dystopian.

Yup, most shopping has become concentrated on that street (Buchanan Street).  The state of Sauchiehall Street, in particular, is the subject of much discussion and despair amongst Glaswegians.

[Dawnrazor]

6 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

 

I spent a weekend in Glasgow at the start of December 2022.  Things weren't too bad in that block of shopping streets between the two train stations, but it was worse than (say) 8 to 10 years ago, and some of the streets were ugly to the point of being almost dystopian.

Other than the Garage and the Barra's I've not been into Glasgow for 30 I bet, but it sounds similar to a lot of places, the main drag is decent but two streets off that is just awful. 

[Tazio]

4 minutes ago, FWJ said:

Yup, most shopping has become concentrated on that street (Buchanan Street).  The state of Sauchiehall Street, in particular, is the subject of much discussion and despair amongst Glaswegians.

Argyll Street between Central Station and Trongate is horrendously run down, including some interesting buildings that would need vast sums of money to get back to looking half decent. 

[AlphonseCapone]

High street shopping is dead. Folk need to accept this and move on. You'd think it was a dead relative the way folk go on about highs streets.

[FWJ]

1 minute ago, Tazio said:

Argyll Street between Central Station and Trongate is horrendously run down, including some interesting buildings that would need vast sums of money to get back to looking half decent. 

Yup Argyll Street too.  They used to talk about the retail “Golden Z” of Sauchiehall, Buchanan and Argyll Streets.  It’s really just “I” now….

[Ulysses]

9 minutes ago, FWJ said:

How did all the big department stores develop and thrive when hardly anyone had cars?

 

Public transport.  Department stores first appeared before public transport became widespread, but the number of them grew rapidly as cities put in place buses, trams and metro systems.

[Ulysses]

4 minutes ago, Tazio said:

Argyll Street between Central Station and Trongate is horrendously run down, including some interesting buildings that would need vast sums of money to get back to looking half decent. 

 

Yep - a remarkably ugly streetscape.

[Spellczech]

Put it this way - I would not be "investing " in city centre property right now...be that retail or residential. Things will get worse as the internet grinds them to dust. Shops are just for looking and trying on stuff now. Fast fashion is destroying the planet with waste. Places like TK Maxx have a loyal customer base of people who buy on the Saturday, wear the item in the evening, and return it at their leisure over the next 2 weeks...

Edited January 5 by Spellczech

[Ulysses]

2 minutes ago, AlphonseCapone said:

High street shopping is dead. Folk need to accept this and move on. You'd think it was a dead relative the way folk go on about highs streets.

 

A couple of posters said earlier in the thread that the key to improving places like Princes Street is a shift to restaurants, bars and the like.  I think that's also true of small and medium sized towns.

[FWJ]

1 minute ago, Ulysses said:

 

Public transport.  Department stores first appeared before public transport became widespread, but the number of them grew rapidly as cities put in place buses, trams and metro systems.

Exactly.  The glory days of Edinburgh shopping were before most people had cars.

Glasgow has the lowest per capita level of car ownership in the U.K. but is (or was until recently) the largest retail centre outside of London.

[Ulysses]

1 minute ago, Spellczech said:

Put it this way - I would not be "investing " in city centre property right now...be that retail or residential. Things will get worse as the internet grinds them to dust. Shops are just for looking and trying on stuff now. Fast fashion is destroying the planet with waste. Places like TK Maxx have a loyal customer base of people who buy on the Saturday, wear the item in the evening, and return it at their leisure over the next 2 weeks...

 

One of Dublin's flagship department stores was Clery's on O'Connell Street.  It went bust and closed down.  The original 19th century building is being redeveloped as a mixed-use centre with food and drink, some retail, a hotel and office space.  But the retail element will be a tiny fraction of what was there before.

[AlphonseCapone]

4 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

 

A couple of posters said earlier in the thread that the key to improving places like Princes Street is a shift to restaurants, bars and the like.  I think that's also true of small and medium sized towns.

 

I think that's the only way to go to bring something back to main streets and better than lambasting the fact the internet exists and folk use it to do shopping now.

[Go for it 1308]

11 minutes ago, AlphonseCapone said:

High street shopping is dead. Folk need to accept this and move on. You'd think it was a dead relative the way folk go on about highs streets.

That's the spirit 😂

[FWJ]

2 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

 

One of Dublin's flagship department stores was Clery's on O'Connell Street.  It went bust and closed down.  The original 19th century building is being redeveloped as a mixed-use centre with food and drink, some retail, a hotel and office space.  But the retail element will be a tiny fraction of what was there before.

Is B.T.s still on the go?   Nice shop,

[Tazio]

Online shopping is fine for stuff you know fits you or isn’t an outlay financially. So the shops in city centres will be the higher end type stuff you get on George Street, John Lewis, and the type of shops that are in St James Quarter. I’ll happily buy workwear or jeans online but if I’m buying something good I want to see it in a shop. 

[Dawnrazor]

2 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

 

One of Dublin's flagship department stores was Clery's on O'Connell Street.  It went bust and closed down.  The original 19th century building is being redeveloped as a mixed-use centre with food and drink, some retail, a hotel and office space.  But the retail element will be a tiny fraction of what was there before.

Kendal had a similar thing, built by an Irish man, Seamus Jennings, K Village, it's now a residential block.

[FWJ]

5 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

 

One of Dublin's flagship department stores was Clery's on O'Connell Street.  It went bust and closed down.  The original 19th century building is being redeveloped as a mixed-use centre with food and drink, some retail, a hotel and office space.  But the retail element will be a tiny fraction of what was there before.

Sounds similar to what’s happening to the Edinburgh dept store - Jenners. Also another just on the next block, RW Forsyth’s.