I think its a mistake. The Rossiter's unit is far too large for Jack Wills, what with the large basement as well. I could imagine some small expansion, as the Jack Wills unit, on the other hand, does seem a little small for them. Any idea how popular the store's been? I can't say I've seen too many people with their bags when in Cardiff. I get the impression the fashion for them has passed a little bit...

As a fan of Jack Wills, I wish i was able to tell you it hasn't been successful, however the store is constantly busy with queues at the tills all the time! The store is tiny for the amount of customers who attempt to squeeze in there. An expansion is definitely required

Agreed the store is drastically too small. As it is supposedly a 'university outfitter' in a city of around 50,000 students you'd think they'd have a bigger shop. Is the Rossiters of Bath ever busy? It's been here for a while but it has never really been that busy whenever I've walked passed. Wouldn't be a great loss for the city if it went, to be honest.

Rossiters is always busy when i have been in, at christmas i could hardly get in due to the number of people queing at the till. it would be a huge loss if it went as its the exact type of shop you want in the arcades, not another clothes shop catering to late teens/young adults.

General news -

The Works on Church St has shut (they have recently opened a bigger store on Queen St). That leaves a vacant unit which would be ideal for pub/restaurant.

Still on Church St something called Italigo is due to open shortly - I think it's an Italian takeaway although not altogether certain.

On Queen St it looks like Chopstix has closed. Can't say I'm that surprised.

On St John St Brighthouse are due to open in the unit vacated by Blacks.

Yeah Chopstix never looked to do a good trade. Not surprised as in London similar ventures seem to do best in the evening, and especially late at night.. and are located around places like Leicester Square that have a lot of nighttime footfall. Thats not the case for Queen Street. A location on St Mary's probably would have been better.

Hopefully a store can go there, although this end of Queen St is a bit weak ATM.

There was an interesting interview with some retail guru on BBC Breakfast yesterday. They were assessing the impact (or otherwise ) of the Portas review on Britain's high streets. There was a lot of positive noises about tarting up shops, holding markets, public art etc until this chap completely poured cold water over everything and said the high street is dying and there isn't anything you can do about it.

He reeled off some stats about the amount of smart phones and tablets sold in the UK, the rise of internet shopping, the various new apps available to make virtual shopping as easy as possible. His view was that there was a retail core that would always need physical premises but this would mostly be concentrated in malls where people would flock to for convenience (and parking).

Other high streets would slowly die until they were either converted into service premises, residential or almost solely A3. His view was there would be exceptions to this rule but by and large the high street as we know it had about 20 years left.

Quite a dystopian view all told. But is he right? It looks like supermarkets are beginning to struggle after years of rising sales but does that actually convert into more sales for independent food retailers? More and more premises in High St/St Mary St are being converted into cafe/restaurant premises (how many clothes retailers in the street for example) whilst SD2 pushes on with more lettings. Has the vision already arrived in Cardiff?

Have we already seen the high watermark for traditional retailing and can only look forward to a slow decline? Is this necessarily a bad thing? There was a time that the city centre was also a residential district after all.

Any views? For what it's worth I think St Mary St has had it as a retail destination and the sooner the Council/landlords accept this the quicker it can begin it's renaissance. I don't think Cardiff is big enough to sustain three big shopping streets and clearly Queen St and the Hayes have left St Mary St behind. Let it become a street of restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, bars, hotels, residential premises, student blocks, entertainment venues, etc. The sooner you accept this the sooner it can be planned and so keep some control.

I also think Cardiff is too small to sustain 3 big malls in a very small area. The Capitol centre seems to back up this guys thesis - the last tenants they have attracted have been Cafe Nero, Easy Gym, Pret and Tesco - food or services. Can anyone seriously see Capitol becoming a serious retail destination again?

How long has Capitol been around? It seems a lot older than all of the other shopping centres. I went in there quite recently, only to find that I was the only one there shopping. It was literally just me and that Asian girl who sells handbags.

I doubt that shopping will go online fully. Many old people can't use technology, so there will always be physical shops that you can go into, but most people will probably be spending online from now on. So that means that the High Street will have to evolve to cope. It'll probably turn towards becoming a dining and leisure centre first, and a shopping destination second.

I was in Capitol yesterday for the first time in yonks. Depressingly quiet, but Tesco was (depressingly) rammed.

Would love it to be something special (Selfridges, Harvey Nicks etc), but obviously that won't be happening. Some cities could sustain a centre with a triangle of anchor stores (John Lewis at the south, House of Fraser to the west and AN Other to the east), but don't think Cardiff could, certainly not at present. Shame.

This is what the new Primark store front coudl look like. I don't think they reckon the high street will be dead in a few years:



Looks a bit messy to me, but that could be the quality of the mixed material graphic design as anything else.

It's a big improvement on the current facade and that's some investment considering the current store is quite new.

At least it stays on Queen Street and not in SD2 which was rumoured around the time the extension opened.

I agree. SD2 is taking most of the retail in the city, that is why St Mary's street is no longer what it once was.

I don't think that the High St is dead or about to die - won't landlords presumably just have to drop their rents accordingly if the retail shit hits the fan on the High St? Judging by the current rents that they receive, my heart doesn't exactly bleed in sympathy.

I think that 'out of town' shopping and internet shopping in particular will continue to rise and become even more 'normalised behaviour' than they are now. The question is whether this growth will take away from the High St or will total consumption just keep on going up (remember that the population is also rising so that will generally mean greater demand). We have become so addicted to a consumerist society that I just can't see it changing any time soon.

I have always found it rather odd that (given the expensive costs of properties on the High St),how relatively little effort is expended upon making alternative uses of the floors above ground level.

Most of the (above ground) floors of the properties on St Mary St/High St(!) are dusty old windows which presumably are mainly empty or used for storage. You'd swear that these buildings were liabilities rather than assets the way that they are neglected. There must be quite a bit of development value lying dormant in these properties which landlords could exploit given the right planning conditions etc.

I think its a mix of storage, but also a fair bit of grade B office space.. although a chunk of that would be empty.

The Primark frontage is definitely an improvement on the awful façade that is currently there, it would also increase St. David's square footage. I do feel that the street in between Boots and the Starbucks is wasted for them. If they were clever they would turn that into another entrance because it is only used by dead frontage, a Greg's, part of the Starbucks, EE's windows a games arcade and the doomed unit which flows into the centre. It surely couldn't be too expensive for the centre to buy it out and with that and the Primark extension it should surely bring that back into the top 10 biggest shopping centres in the UK and further cement Cardiff's reputation as a shopping destination?

A piece on Cardiff Online about Cardiff's tea shops says that Barker clothing is to close, and the very popular coffee shop expand in to the remaining shop unit.

That really puts paid to High Street being a shopping area, which is a shame. And Barker seemed to be reasonably busy when I went in, although that was only ever right before Christmas and the immediate post-Christmas sales. Perhaps the rest of the year it was struggling. The decline of Cardiff's independent fashion retailers really is pretty sad and seems to stand in stark contrast to our near-neighbours in Bristol. In a recent visit I was genuinely impressed by the (somewhat grimey) bohemian feel of part of the city, with random little cafes, pubs, clothes shops, nick nack shops, even junk shops.. and then the thriving retail on Park Road, and in Clifton, just a little way from the all-singing all-dancing Cabot Circus. Why does it seem Cardiff can't support both the independents and the chains? Is St David's a bit too overbearing for the Cardiff catchment?


One final concern is that with a High Street frontage, will people going to the coffee shop now ignore Castle Arcade itself? Would be a shame if that was the case. It does show the strength of the coffee shop sector however, and is a pleasant change from yet more Starbucks and Costa. The council really should let High St / St Mary's street evolve and stop pretending its a regular shopping street. Perhaps there is a role for more specialised shops (e.g. music, fabrics, furnishings), but fashion is done and dusted I reckon.

Cardiff

So Barkers coffee is finally taking the last patch from its clothing namesake is it?

This has always been on the cards given that the coffee element has already expanded twice into the clothes section. Having an entrance on High St will also enable the tobacco fraternity to visit (ie seats outside on High St which will look tidy) - hitherto you couldn't smoke there because the outdoor seats were still within the arcade.

I like Barkers a lot and am interested to see what its Tea shop will be like when it opens in High St Arcade. We do however seem to have hit a stage where I'm beginning to wonder whether people are going to the city centre these days just to have a coffee and a mull around.It's almost as if people never drunk tea or coffee when they went shopping a few decades ago.

We shoudln't forget that Cardiff still has lots of independents in the arcades and there's tha small alt fashion bit on Womanby St. Despite that, its definitely far more of a Primark Superdry Hollister clone town than any kind of alt fashionville.

Interesting about Barkers. High St/St Mary St does now seem dead for fashion. There is High and Mighty (although you could argue that was a specialist store) and another store near to the Cottage pub that I have never seen anyone go in or out of. Thats it I think.

As for independent fashion retailers or having the bohemian type atmosphere of Bristol I think there are a number of reasons. Firstly in the city centre (outside of the arcades) there are very few if any units suitable for small independent fashion retailers. There are some on Wellfield Rd and some in Pontcanna but neither of those two area's are big enough to constitute a 'scene'.

If Tudor Street or Salisbury Rd were to be renovated I could imagine either of those places becoming a sort of studenty/bohemian type place - restaurants, cafes, independent fashion stores, bars, hotels etc etc. Unfortunately both area's are a long way from that.

Secondly Cardiff and it's hinterland is much more working class than Bristol. Paying £190 for a hand knitted tank top in an ethnic design is very much a middle class type of caper and is unlikely to attract a great deal of interest here.

Thirdly I think Bristol has long been a magnet for more 'enlightened' ways of living whereas Cardiff has been up until lately a docks and steel town, conservative with a small c and focused on traditional working class values.

In some ways I'm a little bit envious of Bristol and its green/independent credentials but there is also something insufferably smug about it all as well.

HMV have closed their Queen St store today apparently. I don't know if this is an ominous sign for the company but it leaves a big void. That's a big 3 storey shop so could attract a big name.

Bit of a sad day as that's Cardiff's last big record shop gone.

Just rang hmv head office to ask whether the Queen Street store had closed down and the lady informed me that both the Queen Street store and St Davids store were still open for the mean time

there is a pop-up hmv in the grand arcade



catapult is still going

It seems that it was closed to prepare for a massive sale, the HMV head office bod's comments about being open for the mean time are a bit ominous though!

I have a friend who works there. She said that all of the staff are feeling tense and nobody knows what HMV will do next. Needles to say, there may soon be a lot more unemployed in Cardiff.

Cardiff desperately needs Pull & Bear!

There are 3 Pull and Bear stores in London, Oxford St and both Westfield's and one in Liverpool.

Pull & Bear has a store in Dublin which isn't so tiny - 2nd biggest city after London in ROI/UK I think. In fact, most major international chains have a presence in Dublin as you'd expect from a capital city - Harvey Nicks, A&F, even a Forever 21 (still no sign of them in Cardiff, thought they were rumoured for SD2 at one stage).

I think it may be the third biggest city; London, Birmingham, Dublin, but don't quite me on that. It depends on how you count a city. London is the biggest city in Europe whilst Paris has the largest metropolitan region but London is defined as a greater area than Paris. So it is all subjective really.

I do find it odd that Pull&Bear hasn't made the plunge into other U.K cities. In Europe it is in almost every major city. When I lived in Barcelona there were around 10 within a square mile of each other. Maybe Zara isn't doing so well here, so the group have decided not to expand into Cardiff.

On a different note, is BHS leaving the city completely or is it doing a swap with Primark? Does anybody know?

On that note, Zara in Cardiff is extremely successful and busy - Very surprised Pull & Bear aren't expanding in the UK right now, its like a European Topshop/Topman which is what all the teenagers are into today... Pull&Bear could be really successful in that market here in the UK, in particular Cardiff. I can see them expanding into cities such as Cardiff, Leeds & Manchester soon

To answer the question posed above I think BHS will be re-opening in the current Primark unit once that has been vacated. That looks as though it may be some time as its almost certain Primark will stay there until the refurb of the BHS premises for which they have just applied for planning permission. Unlikely to be completed until at least 6 months hence.

That means that all of the poor buggers working at NHS at the moment will not have a job for the next few months and even if they do get re-hired by BHS will lose continuity of service.

Other retail related news - Ladbrokes have applied to open at 19 Caroline St (currently Rosarios Steakhouse). The march of the betting shop continues - Ladbrokes are due to open in the old Amex unit at the top end of Queen St as well and Corals have recently opened in Churchill Way. It would be interesting to tot up the amount of betting shops in the city centre v coffee shops. The two retail success stories of the noughties or so it seems.

SP- Well one reason that they (and other retailers) are in Dublin and not in Cardiff is because the Republic of Ireland has had the kind of economic growth (albeit of the boom and bust variety!) over the past two decades that we can only dream of in Wales (ie FAR more spending power than us impoverished Taffs across the pond).

There are loads of reasons why certain retailers don't have a presence in some 'seemingly' obvious locations - saturated marketplace, expensive rents, logistics of being able to integrate into existing operations, single currency considerations etc. C&A (they were very much like H&M before H&M spread to the UK) always used to be in the UK (roughly located where Primark are now) and still operate successfully throughout continental Europe but don't have any plans to spread back into the UK.

Re: Biggest city in Europe - isn't it Moscow?

Karl - yet another betting shop!?! I think that I have no concept of just how many daily gamblers there are on the streets these days. Makes yer wonder deosn't it.

Jantra will be popping open a bottle of Tesco Value Prosecco as we speak.....

Wizard, wasn't questioning Dublin's spending power, just thought it was weird that Pull&Bear has chosen Liverpool over Birmingham.

It does seem that Moscow is bigger, by quite a bit too, but London is biggest in the E.U. My bad.

I hear HMV will be entering administration tomorrow. Another big empty store on Queen st ???