Any chance of a link to the 360 masterplan document if possible UR?

Unfortunately, the masterplan is not yet available for public view.

The 2018 edition covers a lot of the same ground, however: https://shorturl.at/iotIQ

The executive report for next week's committee meeting is here: https://shorturl.at/puJV6

Is the UK the only economy seeing this level of contraction in the physical retail sector?

Every local town centre looks like a war zone with failure everywhere you look but in other countries it would appear that town centres still have life and vitality from retail.

There was a dip but normal life is returning in a recognisable form.

Is the UK an outlier where 17 years of Nat economic incompetence / 14 years of Austerity self loathing / 7 years of Brexit self harm is finally delivering an economic collapse of transformational scale?

I fear we have accepted our fate and now await the inevitable societal collapse.

Things are getting so bad that we will not be able to afford the history books to record our fall from grace.

Not good.

I think @fatblokeontour in the UK context we have adopted out of town and retail parks to a much higher extent than our European neighbours, and we are much more car centric society - on top of that I wonder if UK's has embrace online shopping to a much greater extent ?

#3 - If you look at the Centre for Retail Research's work you'll find evidence that the UK has a much higher uptake of online shopping than other European countries, over 30% during the pandemic and still above 25% of total sales.

Much as we love to blame the SNP/ Tories/ Brexit/ politicians in general for everything that's wrong in society - it's our own fault that physical retail is dying. Stop buying junk from Amazon, Ebay, ASOS and the rest of their ilk - go out and buy from bricks & mortar shops instead.

Agree with #4 that edge of town retail parks haven't helped, either.

Many of our towns were ruined in the 60s and 70s by poor redevelopment which created shabby, ugly streets and shops that offer no appeal to shoppers. Out of town retail was almost an apology for this mess. Policy makers now think more homes and trees are the answer to town centre decay but they won't create the vitality that can only come by encouraging commerce.

Many of our towns were ruined in the 60s and 70s by poor redevelopment which created shabby, ugly streets and shops that offer no appeal to shoppers. Out of town retail was almost an apology for this mess. Policy makers now think more homes and trees are the answer to town centre decay but they won't create the vitality that can only come by encouraging commerce.

Issues raised above about UK retail trends then generate a lot of questions around "whjy?"

Bowling alone vibe -- we treat retail as individualised commodity collection exercise rather than as some sort of social event which seems to still exist elsewhere?

City centre parking arrangements and costs are pushing everyone towards out of town retail which has free parking?

1980's / City Centre vs The Forge -- City Centre coped and grew.
2010's / City Centre vs The Fort -- City Centre eventually collapses.

Or back to my original point:
Nat economic incompetence / Austerity self loathing -- economic stagnation / low pound therefore higher costs / lower disposable incomes / Brexit economic frictions ...

All of this means that we don't care anymore about our build surroundings and we just blindly accept what the market / establishment give us?

Or is it a case that with the cost of living crisis post 2010 / aka ConDemNation Austerity means that something had to give and in our case that was our city centre retail environment.

We cannot afford to support a high cost / high amenity city centre retail offering anymore -- all we can afford is out of town sheds and sweatshop warehouses organising / sending out packages in a van?

This proposition could work, could generate a beautiful living environment. But so much will depend upon the quality of the living spaces created. Much contemporary housing is fraught with poor planning and design, foisted on it by greedy developers. Rabbit hutch accommodation built for rent will make for a depressing town centre. Across Glasgow the surviving, quality tenements, show that you can build very densely if internal spaces are generous enough.

The difference is that the rest of Europe’s towns and cities have large populations in their centres to support local retail.

The UK continues to prioritise vast housing estates with no public transport that incentivise online and out of town shopping.

@Chris that's exactly it. If only those vast housing estates already had provisions for people to go to without cars, but when they're designed by developers driven by profit, spaces for people will never be a thing...

Unfortunately, we seem to be heading the same way USA has with suburbs even though we know it does not work for health or wellbeing or productivity or literally any domain which isn't related to profits...

The above might be a breath of fresh air if it happens. Add a couple of outdoor cafes, a bunch of *local* shops and some nice places for people to sit and we might see a revitalised space people might want to go to.

Lack of a city centre / town centre population -- not quite buying that vibe.

Any population numbers to back it up?
Are all UK cities in the same boat?

Auld Reekie with Holyrood in its back pocket seems to be coping a lot better than Glesga and its non functioning city council.

Another comparison would be with Dublin -- similar housing issues -- has its city centre retail offering fell off the same cliff as Glasgow?

Completely agree with the comments above that the suburban model is the main culprit for the decline of public realm in the UK. This is so engrained in the UK planning system that even when flats are built around town centres and in busy roads, the ground floors are kept residential, rather than commercial, with designated commercial areas, which often won’t deliver.

Neighbourhoods should be left to grow organically, and not with top-down ‘cataclysmic’ investment, to quote one famous thinker.

Aye, people in the UK may be more prone to online shopping, but that’s not because they're more technologically savvy or even more mean spirited/ lazy/ unfit, but because in a suburban model shops are physically harder to reach.

The other ingredient for the disastrous recipe is inadequate public transport. It is important to notice that other UK cities with successful town centres including Edinburgh and London (and indeed across Europe, where they were blissfully unaware of Margaret Thatcher), have kept public transport in public hands.

You cannae wish yourself into thriving public realm by adding lots of people like in the render that accompanies this post. Unless there is the appropriate concentration of housing where enough people consider this space the neighbourhood garden, unless its size is considered and does not exceed walkable city parameters, becoming a ‘border vacuum’ in and of itself (to quote afore-non-mentioned thinker again), unless all it’s flanks are considered (currently north east of that site is a dual carriage road, a massive retail park, green empty spaces… i.e. BORDER VACUUMS!) and unless a wholistic and transformative public transport strategy is endeavoured, this intervention is doomed.

The trouble is the above paragraph describes scenarios which in the sclerotic political landscape of the UK are labelled radical.

As someone who lives in Edinburgh, it is interesting to note some admiring comments on our city centre from our neighbours in the west. Sadly, it is the result of the conversion of the city into one great holiday resort with office blocks being converted into hotels and residential flats into holiday rentals. There are less and less major employers in the city centre with correspondingly less footfall from residents. There are also loads of student flat developments. So it is not all rosy in Auld Reekie.

Auld Reekie guy -- stop wasting a Good rant with facts.

Not matter how difficult things are out east Glesga City council will only make things worse.

Useless / hopeless / clueless in equal measure.

Undoing 40 years of progress with low energy student politics / Transport 1400 hobby horsing / sheer laziness.

Hamilton Town centre retail volume -- 70% reduction in floor space?

Seems very radical to me -- ruling out any possibility of a retail recovery of any sort.

Town centre reduced to banks / hairdressers / vaping / dentists -- not much of a future as even these offerings are in decline.

#16 - "Town centre reduced to banks / hairdressers / vaping / dentists" - that doesn't ring true at all. All the big banks are shutting branches as fast as they can, and we're told the NHS is struggling to recruit dentists because they're being seduced into the private sector.

So are you claiming that Hamilton has managed to attract *more* bank branches than elsewhere (completely against the grain), and it's also become a magnet for dentists? Agree that vape shops and hairdressers have become ubiquitous.

Town Centre of the future -- I offer up Rugby where all the changes came about before CoViD could be put forward as an excuse.

List of despair -- you can add in Opticians and Wetherspoons to the mix -- The fluff that is left behind when Retail walks.

Hamilton used to have a pretty active traditional town centre so this level of transformation with 70% of existing retail scheduled for closure / repurposing is catastrophic.

The shape of things to come

Replacing a town centre with an Asda car park -- not good.

I used to work and study in Hamilton, and many of these issues are self-inflicted and a long time coming. Moving UWS out to an isolated business park was a catastrophic decision that diminished footfall in the town centre. New Cross was mismanaged into oblivion. Bairds should have been heavily incentivised for repurposing as a leisure destination instead of being left to rot. The Palace Grounds retail park shouldn't have been built in the first place, or in a condensed form encouraging retailers to make Castle St the centrepiece rather than a literal and metaphorical dead end, adjoining the pedestrianised area rather than turning its back on it. Add in Brexit, mismanaged lockdowns, a decade of austerity and the growth in lazy consumers clicking Buy Now on American or Chinese-owned ecommerce portals instead of actually supporting British brands and British jobs, and you arrive at the current state of Hamilton, Motherwell, Wishaw, Coatbridge, East Kilbride...

To save Quarry Street and entice some life back into Hamilton, it needs high-quality SPACIOUS mixed-tenure homes all around it. What we'll almost certainly get is dreary value-engineered student blocks for a campus several miles away, a couple more budget hotels with blank ground floor frontages, and cramped overpriced flats with no outside space other than small concrete balconies overlooking Low Patrick Street. I can see the 3D renders now.

Pieces falling into place -- strategic fail of the highest order.

Bell College aka UWS pushed out to a business park halfway to East Kilbride and then 5 years later it is found that "infinite" land will be available in the town centre with the post CoViD death of trad town centre retail.

Seemingly the budget for the UWS move to a business park -- already built business park / standing idle business park / hopefully it came with a discount business park -- was £110mill.

Some mistake surely ?