Remember the boom time of the 1980s? A study was done to find a centre of mass affluence in South East England – a place where a shopping centre would be built that would be in the centre of what was deemed to be the wealthiest part of that area. The idea was to build a specialist shopping centre for small, exclusive, up-market shops that would be highly attractive to the surrounding high-income earners.
A, B and C represent areas in the South East of England, where people with high incomes had been identified as living. The hatched area represents the most central area for all of the above people to travel to. This was calculated to be the most favourable place to build the new shopping centre.The place chosen was Hatfield in Hertfordshire and the new building was called The Galleria.
Hatfield was hit badly by the recession of the late 1980s/early 1990s, losing the town’s main employer – British Aerospace. The shop units in The Galleria failed to attract sufficient exclusive boutiques to fill the centre. Those that did sign up quickly closed down.
It was eventually turned into a discount outlet centre and although pretty much the opposite of what it was designed to be, seemed to survive happily in that format during the economic boom of the early twenty-first century. It remains to be seen how the centre will cope with the latest downturn.
