Back To The 1990s? The Speciality Shopping Mall Is Returning To Birmingham, Manchester

The 1990s were fun: the Spice Girls, John Major, high-top sneakers, what's not to like?

Now retail guru John Milligan is promising to reinvent one of what was arguably one of the least successful innovations of the '90s, the speciality shopping mall.

Milligan Retail are now looking for sites of up to 150K SF in Birmingham and Manchester for new-build artisan malls, which is a new iteration of the speciality mall.

Milligan Retail — the force behind Birmingham's revamped Mailbox and the original shopping centre at Manchester's Corn Exchange — is pinning its hopes on Creative Trade, a new concept for the digital age which aims to replace armchair shopping with artisan retail.

Unlike speciality malls, which in the 1990s typically featured high-gloss clusters of luxury global brands, the artisan mall will be tenanted by craftspeople and makers.

The idea is to bring designers and craftspeople together with customers to create "a next generation of retail, entertainment and learning destination," Milligan Retail said. There will be spaces where the designers and craftspeople can forge "a creative destination where consumers hungry for inspiration discover beautiful, original products and ideas brought to them directly by the people who create them".

John Milligan has been involved in the invention or reinvention of a number of speciality destinations. The Mailbox, Birmingham was re-imagined in conjunction with landlord Brockton as a luxury destination. 

Milligan Retail Resort's work in Manchester was more equivocal: the city's Corn Exchange speciality mall, created in the wake of the 1996 bomb, failed to flourish and was subsequently converted into a dining destination.