The Broadmarsh Shopping Centre was opened in 1975. It was originally going to be an Arndale Centre, the now demolished bus station and car park was known as the Arndale car park. The shopping centre was refurbished in 1988. As of 2013 the council had been trying to encourage development at Broadmarsh for 2 decades. In 2002 plans to knock down the existing shopping centre as well as the car park and bus station were approved. Westfield had planned to triple the size of the centre, the new centre would be more like streets and have 2 department stores. The council aproved this plan in 2007, but this would never happen. In 2011 Capital Shopping Centres who owned the Victoria Centre bought the Broadmarsh centre. The Office of Fair Trading started an investigation as they were concerned about the monopoly CSC had of the shopping centres in the city. CSC changed their name to Intu Properties in 2013. Intu wanted to start work on the Victoria Centre but the council insisted that the Broadmarsh should be the priority and offered them £50 million towards the development of Broadmarsh. In 2015 Intu submitted a plan for a rather limited redevelopment of some of the centre which was approved. The bus station and car park was permanently closed and demolished in 2017. Demolition work at the shopping centre started in 2019. In 2020 the Coronavirus pandemic caused works to stop, Intu had also been having financial problems and went into administration, The Broadmarsh Shopping centre was permanently closed apart from the walkway through the west side of the centre. The centre was given to the council and plans for the refurbishment of the centre have been cancelled. The council will now have the rest of the building demolished. At the time of writing this the west side of the centre is currently being pulled down. The east side might survive if Thomas Heatherwick's idea to reuse the structure is chosen.
At the Lister Gate entrance a short tunnel was constructed through where the doors used to be. The square inside had been fenced off.
At the Broadwalk almost every shop is closed and boarded up.
Fopp, Swopnsave and H&M were 3 of the remaining shops.
Wilkinsons, Heron foods and a few other shops were still open, at the end is where the entrance to the bus station used to be.
Lots of scaffolding in the Broadwalk. A large sign where the bridge at the top of the old narrow escalators is.
A small section of the centres new interior had been completed, this is what the rest of the centre would have looked like.
Broadmarsh was permanently closed in July 2020
Only the main route through the centre remained open, everything else was fenced off (Picture above). Outside at collin street was looking very bad (Picture below).
