Fashion Victim: Our retail therapy now much closer to hand

May 29 2008 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

IF SHOPPING were an Olympic sport, then Liverpool would be weighed down with gold medals.

We just love to shop in this city. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we love the act of shopping itself almost as much as we love squeezing a new handbag, dress or pair of shoes into our over-stuffed wardrobes.

The difference between shopping in Liverpool and shopping in any other UK city is that a day’s shopping is not seen as a means to an end here, it is the end.

Walk down Church Street on a Saturday afternoon and you will see women and girls dressed like they are going for a night on the town strolling between the stores and boutiques laden with carrier bags, giggling, chatting and generally having a fabulous time with their girlfriends.

Friends of mine from farther along the M62 often find themselves thrown by this.

You can see it in their faces when they rock up for a day in the city, clad in jeans and trainers only to find themselves up against fully coiffured, high heeled and manicured beauties in the Topshop changing rooms.

Now, finally, after years of struggling on the retail front, the shopping offering in Liverpool is about to match up to our shopping skill.

At a cost of £1bn (an amount uncannily close to the combined spending power of our local Wageratti, I imagine), Liverpool One, which opens its many doors today, will finally bring us level with our city peers across the North-West.

Indeed, it will take us further. When the hoardings come down on the South John Street entrance to this retail empire today, Liverpool will be immediately catapulted up the UK retail rankings from 15th to 5th place, and things will only get better when the second phase opens in September.

I am one of the few people in our office not to have taken one of the hard-hat tours of the development (I thought it might ruin my hair and wasn’t sure that steel-capped boots would go with my miniskirts), so I will enter it today like all the other shoppers, no doubt wide-eyed, open-mouthed and with credit card in hand.

Even after everything I have read, all the artists’ impressions and the things my colleagues have told me, I have to confess I am still not really sure what to expect.

If I am completely honest, up until this year, I was under the illusion that Liverpool One was going to be an enclosed, airless shopping centre akin to the Trafford Centre.

I now realise it will actually be more like a city within a city, with its own streets, terraces, bends, turns and even a zig-zag, and to be quite frank I can barely contain my excitement about the whole thing.

For way too long, Liverpool has been left in the retail wilderness and its inhabitants have been forced to find shopping solace in Manchester and Trafford, but no longer. Liverpool One, here we come.