Wipe in hand, Sana, who wished to remain anonymous, dusted her shelves. It’s 11am, Friday July 17th, the sun filters through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the huge Grand Central shopping center. The young woman runs an Endura stand, a chain specializing in dried roses, on the first floor of this vast glass and white concrete bell on New Street Station, Birmingham station.
She waits for clients, “Not very many”, she observes, fatalistic. “People do not yet dare to come back to the center–city. “ Nearby, elderly people are sipping coffee in an olive-green tea room. Opposite, the two saleswomen of the Pandora jewelry store are a little bored. “We will have to wait for people to stop teleworking and come back to the office to see the world”, they point out. On the ground floor, opposite the railway tracks, Pret A Manger and Wasabi, two must-have fast-food brands in British city centers, only welcome take-out, and the station is almost empty. , as are trains to London (the capital is a ninety-minute journey).
For a Friday, the center of the country’s second largest city (over 1 million people), considered the capital of the West Midlands, is far too quiet. Non-essential stores were only allowed to reopen in England in mid-June, pubs and restaurants only in early July. Scalded by the epidemic, which has killed more than 45,000 people in the United Kingdom since March, customers are coming back in dribbles.
A considerable setback
Many iron curtains are still down. Along with shoe salesman JD, Primark is the only brand that seems to resist the gloom. The low-cost “fast fashion” brand opened its largest store in the world in 2019, a stone’s throw from Grand Central. The shop is teeming with shoppers, even though its Beauty Bar and Mickey Mouse café remain closed: families, elderly couples or gangs of girlfriends choose t-shirts for 2.50 pounds (2.70 euros) or dresses for 15 pounds. .
The clouds are gathering over Birmingham: in May, the Debenhams chain announced the closure of its department store in Bullring, another shopping center close to Grand Central. Eventually it reopened in June, but its future is uncertain. Debenhams is bankrupt. In 2019, competitor House of Fraser, also in a very bad shape, had partly closed its department store on Corporation Street. On July 9, the John Lewis brand announced the closure of eight department stores in the country, including its flagship Grand Central, four floors inaugurated with pomp just five years ago, opposite the stand of Sana.
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