Reimagining our nation’s shopping centres

Redhead Architects led a diverse team of experts, consultants and community stakeholders to explore ideas and seek new and hopefully more interesting ways to ‘re-imagine’ our nation’s shopping centres, with a view to helping them to make more a more dynamic and more relevant contribution, rather than maintain the now out-dated consumerist ‘mono-culture’ of the 1960s through to 1990s.

Our goal is to help reinforce the strong sense of community which already exists here, by offering a more varied programme aimed to inform, educate and entertain. Rather than risk inadvertently ‘throwing-away’ what’s there, by commissioning data-led high-level reports and assessments, we seek to understand better which elements work well already and where adaptation and repurposing would help. This process of ‘adaptive re-use’ aims to strengthen what’s there as well as attracting more visitors to the centre and the town as a whole.

We plan to start by bringing a huge redundant basement car park back to into use, this time, providing a broad range of experiences, including a new museum and arts space, a cafe with hydroponically farmed vegetables grown on site with a programme of cookery classes and events. We also plan to provide a series of workshop spaces to encourage visitors to try their hand at a new skill, learn an instrument or attend a new class.

We also have ambitious plans for the upper level of the Mall, to incorporate the library next door to offer adult education, creche facilities, a climbing wall, and a reimagined hub, providing meeting spaces for small businesses and students from the local college all in the same environment.