The busy streets of Liverpool ONE may seem a world away from the squares of Mayfair - but the boss of property giant Grosvenor says the same long-term thinking is helping both areas to thrive.
Grosvenor this month celebrated the 15th anniversary of the opening of the massive Liverpool ONE retail and leisure complex, inviting journalists from around the country to tour the complex and to a debate led by former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine.
The group's CEO Mark Preston also joined the panel - and said Grosvenor's long-term thinking was key to its success in London and Liverpool.
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Grosvenor is the family property business of the Duke of Westminster. The Grosvenor family can trace its history back 1,000 years, while its London property business dates back to 1677 when Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies and land to the west of the city of London came into the family.
The family built houses for London's growing population, and those meadows and marshes became the exclusive areas of Mayfair and Belgravia that Grosvenor still owns today.
Grosvenor expanded nationally and internationally in the 20th century, developing town centre shopping developments across the 海角视频.
Liverpool ONE, opened in 2008, was and remains its flagship development outside London. The scheme transformed a large swathe of the city centre into a 1.65m sq ft outdoor complex that includes department stores, leisure venues and many busy shops across a series of streets and individually designed buildings designed to give a sense of variety not seen in a standard covered shopping centre.
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One of the key points stressed by Grosvenor was that Liverpool ONE had changed in those 15 years. The complex now has a far greater focus on food and leisure, with one area originally lined up for furniture stores now focused on bustling restaurants.
And even the disappearance of former anchor tenant Debenhams helped create new opportunities. Marks & Spencer moved from elsewhere in Liverpool to take the lower floors of the old Debenhams block, while the upper floors now house the loud and buzzing Gravity Max entertainment complex with its neon-lit E-karting track.
Mr Preston said adaptability was key to the success of any property development. Grosvenor's heritage and the scale of its holdings mean lessons can be shared across the group.
He said: "Take the London estate as a good example, which of course has been around for a lot longer than Liverpool ONE has. But again its uses have changed and continue to change and will continue to change.
"That’s what’s so exciting about owning a collection of streets and properties - you have the ability to be able to work across buildings to keep the thing fresh and current and contemporary whereas if you’ve got individual owners of individual buildings it’s a lot harder to do that.
"What you’re seeing and observing in Liverpool is exactly what we would have expected would happen and it’ll continue to evolve and change, just as indeed Mayfair has - when buildings that were originally built as houses then became offices and then became hotels, and maybe some of them have gone back to being houses again."
Mr Preston told BusinessLive that he was proud of his company's long-term commitment to Liverpool.
He said: "That’s the whole point. We’ve made a decision that we think this is a part of the world that we wanted to invest in. We then put our foot forward on the basis that it would be a long-term investment not 'get in, do it, turn around and exit'."