ONE of the UK’s leading retail bosses has issued a stark warning to civic leaders in Aberdeen over the future development of the city centre.
John Lewis director Andrew Murphy said inactivity would “kill” the area – despite a clearly buoyant local economy.
He also said that successive local authorities had “failed to seize opportunities” presented by the success of the oil and gas industry.
Mr Murphy’s intervention follows years of divisive debate over the future of the centre of Aberdeen, with redevelopment plans for Union Terrace Gardens at the forefront.
Council leaders insisted last night that work was being done to address the state of the main shopping thoroughfare and surrounding streets and pledged that a newly-formed regeneration board would deliver improvements.
But opposition members said the comments should be taken “very seriously” and should inject a sense of “urgency” into efforts from the Labour-Conservative-Independent coalition administration.
Mr Murphy, the former managing director of the John Lewis branch in Aberdeen and now the department store’s UK retail director, recently spoke at a Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) dinner in the city.
He said yesterday: “The local authority in Aberdeen is just assuming that the city centre can just take care of itself, but that is just not true. We have got a fantastic local economy and our city centre, by any comparative measure with any other Scottish city centre, is doing well, but that is not enough.
“The thing that will kill the city centre is inactivity and that will come down to a failure of stakeholders to work together. We have a saying in John Lewis – don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good. If everybody is waiting for the perfect idea or the perfect plan, the thing that everybody agrees upon, then they are going to be sitting with the same problems in 10 years time.”
The businessman is a former member of public-private partnership Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future (Acsef) and was involved at the early stages of Sir Ian Wood’s plans for the city centre.
The retired oil services tycoon offered £50million towards a revamp of Union Terrace Gardens, but that pledge is now off the table after a deadline for council leaders to back a “transformative” scheme was extended twice. However, Mr Murphy said that the decision to scrap the controversial £140million City Garden Project (CGP) was “not the end of the world”.
He said: “If it is a missed opportunity, then it is only in keeping with the inactivity of the local authority regarding the city centre over many years.
“First of all, they allowed peripheral developments outwith the city centre at Berryden and at the beach – we said at the time that we did not think that was a good idea.
“The city centre was not strong enough for that type of competition.
“Understanding how a city centre works is a complex thing, what seems like a small distance to travel can be quite pivotal.
“Even with Union Square, which some could describe as a city centre development, moving 100yards to the south of Union Street can impact, for example, anyone who is on the other side of Union Street.
“The way that (CGP) would have worked was by filling in that hole and making it easier to access from all directions of Aberdeen city centre. Union Terrace Gardens remains an issue, but letting that specific plan go off the table is not the end of the world.
“What is needed is a totemic project that says to business and investors – this is a city that is moving forward, that has direction.”
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