The Buchanan Galleries facade on Buchanan Street |
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| Location | Glasgow, Scotland |
|---|---|
| Opening date | 1999 |
| Owner | (Land Securities & Henderson Global Investors) |
| No. of stores and services | 80 |
| No. of anchor tenants | 4 |
| Total retail floor area | 56,000 m² |
| Parking | 2,000 spaces |
| Website | http://www.buchanangalleries.co.uk/ |
Buchanan Galleries is a shopping centre located in the central area of Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland. Construction began in 1996 and the building opened to the public on 31 March 1999. Costing £250 million, it is one of the largest city centre shopping developments in the United Kingdom, boasting an internal retail space of nearly 56,000 m². The building adjoins onto the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and could be classified as the first urban megastructure to be built in Glasgow city centre since the infamous Anderston Centre of the early 1970s.
The complex's anchor tenant is John Lewis which occupies all of the northern side of the complex, including part of the car park area which it uses as a customer collections point.
The Galleries is located on the junction between the famous Glaswegian shopping streets of Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street, a previously run down area full of derelict buildings (the site was once the home to the Glasgow branch of the NAAFI), and half-abandoned stores. Construction of the building posed a number of problems due to its size: firstly, the car park element of the centre had to traverse the railway tracks leading from the adjacent Glasgow Queen Street station, and the mall section itself had to be built over Cathedral Street.
The mall houses eighty shops, and incorporates a ten-storey car park with two thousand spaces, twenty-two elevators, and nineteen escalators. The building has a design life of one hundred years.
The joint owners (Land Securities and Henderson Global Investors) plan to double the centre in size, by demolishing the current car park and building on that site. A replacement car park will be put in place on top of the Buchanan bus station which will itself be redeveloped. An outline planning application was submitted in April 2007 to Glasgow City Council and construction could begin as early as 2008.[1]