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Results/analysis This Section Will First Present A Set Of Case Studies Of ...



Results/Analysis
This section will first present a set of case studies of three in-town shopping centre developments: Festival Place in Basingstoke, The Oracle in Reading and The New Bull Ring in Birmingham. The case studies will present an overview of each shopping centre, in terms of where and why it was built, and the impact it has had on the local economy. The Oracle in-town shopping centre in Reading will then be focussed on, in terms of providing a more in-depth study of the impact of the shopping centre on the local economy and community.
Case study 1: Festival Place in Basingstoke
Festival Place in Basingstoke opened in 2002, with one hundred and sixty five retail outlets, and several large department stores, including BHS and Marks and Spencer. It also boasts a cinema and a nightclub and hosts the site of the town's library. The shopping centre is right in the town centre, very close to transport links such as the railway; in addition, the bus station for the town is incorporated within the bounds of the shopping centre, and two major motorways are very close also, with nearly four thousand car parking spaces for people arriving by car.
Festival Place has been a successful development for its owners, Grosvenor Estates, by all accounts, and is regularly ranked amongst the top three UK in-town shopping centres. It is expected, by Grosvenor Estates, that Festival Place may overtake The Oracle in Reading as the shopping centre ‘of choice' for many local residents; this would be another interesting study in itself, to assess the effects of proximity of in-town shopping centres on their competitiveness. As stated in the Government's Planning Policy Statement 6: Planning for Town Centres, not only do local planning authorities need to plan for the success of local in-town shopping centres, but it should be a matter of urgency that regional planners plan the location of in-town shopping centres thoroughly, across the region in which they work; it is, perhaps, not optimal to have two in-town shopping centres so close to each other, in terms of sustaining custom for both centres, and maintaining economic activity in both town centres following the opening of a ‘rival' in-town shopping centre. There is no current literature on this topic, and assessing this issue is beyond the scope of this dissertation, and so any conclusions as to this discussion are pure conjecture and will not be entered in to here.
Case Study 2: The Oracle in Reading
The Oracle in Reading was the first of the in-town shopping centres to be built, in response to the Government's Planning Policy Statement Number 6.


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