DICKENS YARD

SEC's KEY CONCERNS for Retail at Dickens Yard

The Developer and Council are using retail as a ‘smoke screen’ for a very large amount of densely packed housing.

Retail has been included in the development because the Council insisted on its inclusion in the site brief they sent to potential developers. The Developer has to include retail, or lose the opportunity to build housing on the site. 

Retailing on the Dickens Yard site will be high risk because: 

·                There is no history of retailing on the Dickens Yard site. If this was an attractive location for retailers, market forces mean that shops would have been built there years ago. 

·                The site is peripheral to existing shopping locations in the town centre. It is located at the edge of the town centre on a ‘back land’ site tucked away alongside the railway line.  There is no ‘footfall’ of potential shoppers passing through Dickens Yard on their way to and from other parts of the town centre. 

·                There are major flaws, resulting in substantial overstatements, in the Council’s projections of the need for increased shopping space in Ealing. 

·                The high rise, over-shadowed, wind and rain swept design of Dickens Yard is unlikely to appeal to the ‘Aspirational’ shoppers the Developers and Council hope to attract to the Dickens Yard shops. These consumers will continue to shop in Richmond, Chiswick, Kingston and the West End. They will also be attracted by the sheer scale and choice of White City. 

·                There are a large number of vacant shopping units in Ealing. Adding extra shops will add to the problems of oversupply.
 

THE RETAIL PROPOSALS FOR DICKENS YARD

Less information has been provided with this planning application for Council owned land than was submitted by Glenkerrin for the Leaf/Arcadia development.   This picture shows the basic layout:

The Dickens Yard total of 9,040 square metres of extra space breaks down as:

·                22 “Class A1” Retail units totalling 8,079 sq m gross internal area
·                5 “Class A3” Café units totalling 961 sq m gross internal area

The Developer has not stated the floorspace capacity of the individual units, something which was included in the Leaf/Arcadia planning application.
 

Some comparisons

At 9,040 sq m, the total retail floor space in Dickens Yard is less than just one of the four large anchor stores at the new White City shopping centre, where the House of Fraser store will be 14,600 sq m and Marks & Spencer’s will be 9,600 sq m. White City will also include a large Debenhams and Next. 

The largest of the proposed retail units in Dickens Yard will be smaller than just the ground floor of Primark/Beales/Bentalls. This is too small for a viable department store.  

The next largest shop in Dickens Yard will be smaller than W H Smiths. 

Target Customers

The Developer has indicated that the Dickens Yard shops will be targeted at the 25 to 45 year old, predominantly female, ‘Aspirational’ shoppers. These form a relatively small proportion of Ealing’s population. 

Few, if any, of the exemplar retailers cited by the Developer have any interest in shoppers over the age of 50. 

The retail provision ignores the growing number of mortgage free older Ealing residents, many of whom are in receipt of inflation proofed pensions and who should be one of the key target groups for any retail development.
 

Competition from White City

Dickens Yard will attempt to attract the same ‘Aspirational’ chain retailers as White City. The problem for Ealing is that those retailers will have larger outlets at White City offering greater product ranges than their branches at Dickens Yard.  

White City will be five times the size of Ealing’s Broadway Shopping Centre, and fifteen times the size of Dickens Yard. The sheer size of White City means that its customers will have a much greater choice of shops than in Ealing.   

White City will be extremely accessible to Ealing residents. It is 13 minutes away by tube, and will be on the way home for many Central Line commuters. It will also have 4,500 car parking spaces, which are likely to prove a major attraction to Ealing residents who live north of the railway line and who have to face the challenge of the one way system if they wish to drive into Ealing town centre. 

Shoppers are likely to go to the shopping centre offering the greatest choice and the easiest access.

Cars and Shopping

A detailed survey by Transport for London has confirmed that ‘Aspirational’ shoppers spend more than others, and that they expect to travel to the shops by car. Uxbridge added 1,500 shopper car parking spaces when The Chimes shopping centre opened. This was on top of an already extensive car parking provision in the town. 

The 282 shopper car parking spaces proposed for Dickens Yard are unlikely to be enough to contribute to a retail revival, but will be more than enough to convert the roads to the north of the railway line into a day long rat run.
 

Retailer Relocation within Ealing

The Developer’s professional advisors have admitted that some retailers may relocate into Dickens Yard from elsewhere in Ealing. This could exacerbate the problem of vacant retail premises elsewhere in Ealing town centre.
 

Overcapacity in Ealing

The proposed increase in retail floor space at Dickens Yard is likely to be too little to attract many extra shoppers to Ealing. But, it may be enough to exacerbate the current overcapacity of retail floorspace and vacancies in the town centre. Adding 9,040 sq m of extra retail and café floor space would be the same as increasing the size of the Broadway Centre by a third, a location where many of the shops are either vacant or are about to be surrendered by their tenants.
 

Growth Projections

The Developer has relied on the Council’s projections of the growth in demand for retail floor space in the town centre.  

The forecasts are based on a number of optimistic assumptions which are likely to have resulted in a substantial overstatement of future demand. Among the areas of concern are the assumptions that:

·                There are no vacant shops in the town centre,
·                Retail sales will grow at 4.3% a year, over and above the rate of inflation,
·                The sales projections include an 18% uplift for visitors who live outside the Borough and who
                 visit but don’t shop in Ealing,
·                There will not be any loss of trade to White City by the residents of W5 and W13 

A more sober set of assumptions results in negative/zero retail growth for the foreseeable future and no requirement for additional retail space. 

SUMMARY 

The retail proposals for Dickens yard are both too little and too much. They are insufficient to provide any meaningful competition to the attraction posed by White City, while they will almost certainly contribute to an over supply of retail floorspace across Ealing town centre, 

The proposals are based on flawed and over optimistic projections of retail growth in Ealing town centre. 

The Dickens Yard shops are targeted at a very small proportion of Ealing’s population, and ignore the present and future demographics of Ealing town centre’s immediate shopper catchment area.