The Interview
Meet the man getting ready to open up shop
11th August 2011
Richard Maynard talks to Neil Carter, the centre manager of the new Parkway scheme in Newbury
NEWBURY’S multi-million pound shopping centre Parkway is now tantalisingly close to opening, and as the big day in mid-October looms, the man tasked with overseeing it is centre manager Neil Carter.With 475,000 sq ft of space (295 sq ft of which is retail), and big names such as Debenhams, and John Lewis, joining retail chains such as H&M, Fatface, Topshop and Lakeland, it is certainly a big job.
Mr Carter’s background is retail, through and through. With 17 years’ retail experience, he has spent four years running the County Mall shopping Centre, in Crawley, having learned the business with management positions at Marks & Spencer and Debenhams. Newbury, though, is a new experience.
First impressions have been good. “I love Newbury,” he said. “One of the reasons that I came for this job was that we had to find somewhere nice to live. My wife’s views were very important to where we would re-locate to!
“It is a beautiful area to live, so that’s the attraction to the area itself, and the town is a lovely town. We used to live in Epsom so we know racing very well – moving to another race town was a nice move.
“But professionally, the reason Newbury attracted was that a new scheme is fantastic. You don’t get a chance to open a new shopping centre very often. That was very encouraging.
“I knew Standard Life [the developer behind the Parkway development] from my previous role in Crawley, which is a Standard Life site, and I enjoyed working with them, and wanted to continue that relationship.
“The third thing was, having visited Newbury two or three times before actually starting, you could see that there were a lot of positives and potential for the future. It’s better to be working in a place where you think ‘It’s going to improve over the next five years’ than somewhere that might not.”
When we met, Mr Carter was about to take what would be his last holiday before the final run-up to the opening. “It is busy at the moment,” he said. “From our point of view, as the people who will be managing the site when it goes live, it is about getting the procedures in place now. It’s meeting everyone in the town that we are going to be working with, into the future, starting to get a relationship with our tenants coming into the centre, as they start to shopfit and recruit staff over the next few weeks. It’s about getting everything ready for that launch day, and then making sure that everything is right from launch day onwards, and that it all runs very smoothly.”
While Mr Carter is not involved directly in marketing units to prospective tenants, which is left to two letting agents, (Strutt & Parker, and Jones Lang LaSalle) he is called upon to show people around the site to look at specific units, and of course to ‘sell’ Newbury itself.
Newbury is currently looking at obtaining BID (Business Improvement District) status, an area with which Mr Carter is familiar, from his time with Debenhams in Croydon. “Generally speaking, Standard Life are supportive of Business Improvement Districts up and down the country,” he said, “and it’s certainly something we would be speaking to the BID team about. But my focus right now is opening on October 27 and I am pretty much flat out on that. From that point onwards, we would look to see how we could be involved.”
Mr Carter does not see Parkway as providing competition to towns such as Reading or Basingstoke. “The real competition is the internet,” he said. “On a day-to-day basis, people go shopping for their clothes, and they can pick Reading, they can pick Basingstoke, they can pick Newbury, pretty much on the toss of a coin in the morning, but I think Newbury wins on those grounds because we’ve got a nicer town to be in. But it’s fighting against the internet and supermarkets, and what we are hoping to do, and add to Newbury, is make it a nice destination to come shopping here, rather than just sit in a living room and order online, or go to the supermarket and buy everything in one go.
“The idea behind Parkway is to give a whole experience to Newbury, and to build on what it’s already got.”
Mr Carter firmly believes that existing businesses in the town will benefit from Parkway too. “The way shopping centres are now, and I call us a shopping centre even though we haven’t got a roof, is that they’re not stand-alone, isolated developments, they integrate with the town. With Newbury, it’s really about making sure that everything comes together, so that everybody benefits. Whatever extra footfall we generate from our new tenants, everyone should be able to benefit from that – not just the retailers, there will be benefits to pubs, restaurants, taxi drivers, bus companies. So getting the town vibrant and busier has got to suit anyone who has got a business in the town.
“There are a lot of names that are new to Newbury, so straight away we are bringing in different retailers that we’ve not seen before. Those retailers will exist in Reading and Basingstoke, so the customers who go there for a specific retailer can now say ‘I don’t need to go to Reading because they’re here’.
“John Lewis in Reading have a lot of customers from the Newbury area, and now, they have taken a decision that by being in the town, those customers who might go there every two months will go into the Newbury branch every week or two weeks, so they will sell more goods. That’s got to be good for the town.”
Where Newbury differs from Reading or Basingstoke, according to Mr Carter, is that those towns do not have the independent shops. “In Newbury, because it’s quite a compact town, you find national names and independents, and they are going to benefit because some customers are going to go to those boutiques and spend money. So we’ve got a nice mix for the future.
Parkway is currently 70 per cent let by area, and Mr Carter is “pretty confident” that the remaining 30 per cent will be taken up. “We’ve had a pretty good uptake so far,” he said. “There is still interest and discussions ongoing with retailers, and we will be able to announce those in due course. Personally, I am not worried about that at all.”
While the economic climate has been bleak in recent years, Mr Carter believes that there has been a polarisation between prime areas and secondary areas, with Newbury as a prime area. “Even if the economy struggles over the next few years, I think we are well-placed in Newbury,” he said.
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