Victoria Centre

Decent local shopping centre with a fair range of shops and food outlets. I used to really enjoy shopping at Victoria Centre in years gone by when it was much more buzzing and busy with customers than it seems to be today - it just feels a bit dated and unloved nowadays with a fair number of empty units and a lack of anything genuinely approaching designer shopping available.

One of the major issues is that shops at Victoria Centre close early - typically before 6pm so shopping times are limited to the daytime hours really. The fact that they also charge extortionate amounts for parking is absolutely ridiculous - particularly when you have the 10x bigger (and 50x better) Meadowhall shopping centre a 45-min or so drive away. At Meadowhall you can park for free for basically as long as you want so you never feel rushed to get back to your car and can shop and eat and drink in their extensive food-court (Victoria Centre's food offering is fairly pathetic by comparison) at your leisure. In addition to providing free-parking, Meadowhall and most other quality customer-focused shopping centres provide late evening/night-time shopping basically every day which for many customers makes them much more attractive and accessible shopping destinations than the antiquated and out of touch traditional office opening hours operated at Victoria Centre.

The people running Victoria Centre desperately need to wake up and move with the times - people with disposable income are likely to also have a car and will quite probably want the convenience of being able to drive into the city centre and park and shop at their convenience - without feeling like they are on the clock and being charged through the nose for the privilege. The majority of people are at work during the antiquated 9 - 5:30/6pm opening hours that most shops in Victoria still operate - shops that inconveniently close around the time that most people finish work and are free to visit and spend their hard-earned cash!

Providing free parking - or perhaps validated parking whereby you are allowed to park for free if you can provide proof of a minimum purchase made in the centre - and providing late evening opening hours (potentially with a later start time in the mornings - seriously how many people are out shopping at 9am on a weekday morning anyway?) to enable nighttime shopping would no doubt be an attractive proposition to many customers and in my opinion would really help to increase visitor numbers.

If Victoria Centre wants people to choose to come and spend their money there they have to make it as attractive and convenient a destination as possible for customers to visit. Fail to do this and the place will inevitably see more and more empty units as visitor numbers dwindle before dying off altogether like the old Broadmarsh Centre on the other side of town did a few years back. If Victoria Centre doesn't get with the times, customers will inevitably instead choose more convenient and cheaper online shopping, retail parks (again usually with free parking and late opening hours) or more attractive and accessible shopping centres elsewhere. Failure to arrest and reverse the continued decline of Victoria Centre would be a tragedy for Nottingham city centre which has already been decimated by the closure of Broadmarsh Centre followed by hundreds of shops in the area when customer footfall locally fell off a cliff - hopefully Victoria Centre can saved from a similar fate by it's owners waking up and smelling the coffee and learning from the success of other thriving city shopping destinations.