In Bolton’s town centre, the gap-toothed brutalist facade of Crompton Place shopping centre faces off against the majestic Victorian town hall.

While the civic building’s sandstone edifice, complete with classical columns and stone lions, evokes the mill town’s heyday, time has not been kind to Crompton Place.

Opened with great fanfare as an Arndale Centre in 1971, and once famed for its fountain and colony of colourful budgies, it was renamed in 1989 after the Bolton-born industrialist Samuel Crompton.

But of its 46 units, only a handful of stores remain trading, including Primark and a few independents, while broken windows pockmark the rest.

Inside, shoppers are few and far between in the brightly lit but low-ceilinged walkways. A BHS sign still hangs on its upper floor, despite the department store chain’s demise eight years ago.

It is almost the end of the line for Crompton Place, with its demolition scheduled for next year.

Bolton council, which bought Crompton Place for almost £15m from the Santander pension fund in 2018, plans to knock it down, saying the town has “a surplus of retail space”. In its place the council says it wants to build a more attractive area that it hopes will attract new tenants to empty sites around the main square and nearby streets, as part of a £1bn town centre redevelopment.

Crompton’s demise is echoed in towns and cities across the UK. Tired shopping centres have become one of the biggest obstacles to reviving high streets. Often hemmed in by buildings and hugely expensive to overhaul, they have turned from assets to liabilities – victims of a vicious cycle of store closures. Councils are increasingly becoming the owners of last resort, buying shopping centres from investment funds.

Urban decay

About 60 of the UK’s 500 bigger shopping centres are likely to be razed completely, and a further 200 could be partially demolished, according to a report by the property consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH).

Outside that top 500, dozens more are at risk as the big chains such as Marks & Spencer, House of Fraser and Wilko have dramatically downsized, while a number of former anchor stores such as Debenhams and Topshop no longer have a physical high street presence.

The reasons for their demise are well-trodden: the rise of internet shopping; working from home; an epidemic of retail chain collapses; and the rise of out-of-town shopping centres.

All that has left the UK with far too much retail space. Shopping centres have average vacancy rates of 19%, according to LSH.

Among the shopping centres facing demolition are City Square in Lincoln, Eccles in Salford, Kirkgate in Bradford, Oak Mall in Greenock, west Scotland, and the Strand in Bootle, near Liverpool.

They follow a string of demolitions in recent years including Elephant and Castle shopping centre in south London; Castlegate in Stockton-on-Tees; the Agora Centre in Wolverton, Milton Keynes; and a big chunk of Nottingham’s Broadmarsh.

In Bolton, Crompton is to be replaced with a mix of homes, leisure facilities, food and offices with new public space opposite the town hall.

Stephen Warren, the owner of watch menders Time-Piece, is one of the last remaining traders after almost 20 years in the shopping centre.

“Bolton is finished,” he says. “All the big shops have gone and that’s not helpful.”

“They have taken the heart out of Bolton,” agrees Ian Lomax, 75, who is in town with his wife. He is unsure whether knocking Compton Place down will spur a revival.

“The big shops have all gone to places like Bury,” Lomax says, adding that there are few places for a couple to have an evening out. “We did have a mix of shops, cafes and restaurants but [many] have closed down. It’s hen parties and stag nights and you have to watch who’s about. You can feel threatened.”

The 1970s golden years

When Birmingham’s Bullring, the first modern incarnation of a city shopping centre, was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1964, it epitomised the consumer boom on the UK’s high streets.

Vast retail emporiums followed: Meadowhall in Sheffield opened in 1990; Lakeside in Essex in 1990; Bluewater in Kent in 1999, spawning much smaller imitations in towns across the UK. While a relatively small number of premium centres such as Westfield’s glitzy shopping centres in west and east London and the Trafford Centre in Manchester are thriving, smaller centres are struggling as retailers opt for far fewer but larger sites.

Big sites still change hands for substantial sums – Norway’s sovereign wealth fund bought the half of Meadowhall that it did not own for £360m this year from British Land.

But Sean Prigmore, the head of retail at LSH, says many shopping centres are “coming to the end of their useful economic lifecycle. A lot of centres of a certain age, built in the development boom in the early 1970s or 1980s, have had their heyday.”

LSH’s shopping centres report says “only a very small handful of centres are seen as requiring no significant interventions in the medium term”.

There is no one answer to the knotty problem. In Stockton, its Castlegate centre will be replaced by parks, while homes and university buildings will spring up in place of Elephant and Castle’s former shopping centre. More homes are planned on the sites of several centres from Bristol to Milton Keynes.

Jonathan Wallace, the executive chair of the development consultancy Lichfields, says: “Every centre is different and faces different challenges. Some can be repurposed for a new use or a new mix of uses. Others need to be demolished and the land redeveloped.”

Mini-golf anyone?

For some, the answer will be partial redevelopment. A slice of Landsec’s shopping centre in Lewisham, south London, is to be replaced by a new town square, homes and more shops.

Bruce Findlay, the managing director for retail at the commercial property development and investment company, is overseeing big revamps of its centres in Cardiff, Glasgow and Lewisham. He admits there can be “huge risk” involved but says centres need to evolve to embrace new trends, from health to competitive socialising such as mini-golf or darts. “Sometimes you have to trim the tree to make it grow,” Findlay says.

However, refitting 1970s and 1980s centres is complex and expensive given that many contain asbestos, have units that are the wrong size for modern tastes and have lots of ageing infrastructure needing replacement – from leaking roofs to broken lifts and escalators.

Some projects involving housing have ground to a halt, as developers say the economic logic has been hit by a surge in construction costs and a depressed housing and retail market.

Steve Norris, the head of planning, regeneration and infrastructure at LSH, says: “More homes can underpin the viability of a centre and generate footfall and spend but it is not easy.”

A scheme to build more than 1,000 homes, as well as retail and leisure space, on the moribund Anglia Square shopping centre in Norwich was unexpectedly cancelled in February just as demolition teams were set to move in. The developer Weston Homes, which had been working with the site’s owner, the asset management firm Columbia Threadneedle, blamed rising costs, waning demand for retail and the former government’s policies for backing out of its plans.

Norwich council is now aiming to buy the site to push through affordable homes and a more “eclectic mix” of retail and leisure in place of Anglia Square which has been vacant for many years.

Councils have been behind many of the reinvention plans for older centres, but are also now holding back as budgets are squeezed and a crucial source of funding, cheap Treasury loans, dry up.

The disastrous experiences of councils such as Woking, which went bust after a massive investment spree including in a shopping centre, have also dampened enthusiasm, as have the complexities of needing to marshal disparate interests, from landlords and tenants to lenders.

While some schemes – including Middlesbrough where the council bought two of its four local shopping centres and is shifting them from retail towards leisure and health – are deemed successful, Will Lund at the property advisory firm Knight Frank says many councils are scared of a backlash against spending on retail assets.

Prigmore at LSH says: “We are not going to see many councils do acquisitions unless there is a very strong regeneration purpose such as community or civic space.”

Speculative investors

However, the massive decline in the value of shopping centres in recent years and stabilising rents are bringing in other speculative investors.

The parent group of Ikea recently bought Brighton’s Churchill Square with the aim of revamping it anchored by one of its own furniture stores, as it has already done in Hammersmith, west London.

Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, meanwhile, has now snapped up at least six shopping centres from the Overgate in Dundee to Princesshay in Exeter, using its plethora of brands such as Sports Direct and the luxury streetwear chain Flannels to revive the space.

Lund says retailers have begun to acknowledge that “physical stores are more important” than they might have thought during the pandemic.

Some investment funds have begun to specialise in reviving tired centres, where they see the possibility of attractive returns. They include Running Hare, which now owns Runcorn Shopping City in Runcorn and the Belfry in Redhill, as well as investment group M Core’s Evolve Estates and LCP, which together have spent more than £200m on UK shopping centres in the past year. They join Landsec and NewRiver, which owns a number of mid-ranking centres including a handful set for major redevelopment or demolition.

They are banking on attracting retailers who have not been able to get space in the prime shopping centres and hope the shift to working from home and increased enthusiasm for shopping in person to deliver more visitors.

Private, often locally based entrepreneurs have also snapped up smaller centres, thinking they can sell on for a higher price as the retail market improves.

Prigmore is sceptical. “Yields are seemingly attractive but the reality is there is a lot of work to do to improve those centres,” he says.