Colin Farquhar: M&S shuts with a whimper but can Union Street come back with a bang?

Press and Journal

14-05-2025

So there it goes; the death of another long-standing Union Street fixture – 'not with a bang, but with a whimper'. This was T.S Eliot writing in The Hollow Men, likely not prophesying the struggles of 21st-Century high street retail in Aberdeen, but accurate nonetheless.
Ahead of schedule, M&S at the St Nicholas Centre closed its doors for the last time last week to very little fanfare, as its replacement at Union Square roars into life. We were supposed to have it until late summer.
Firstly, I hope any staff who have lost their earnings during the process have been looked after, although it appears many have been transferred to the new flagship.
Eighty-one years of trading quietly ceased, the store joins Debenhams and John Lewis as a monument to an image of Aberdeen city centre long past – an Unholy Trinity of empty department stores.
Meanwhile, Union Street still coughs and splutters. 'This is the way the world ends'.
I found myself in the Bon Accord and St Nicholas Centres on Saturday morning, and passing through into the square ahead of the old M&S entrance I found no real discernible change as yet.
As a man who is very nearly a certain age – you may have noticed my distinguished grey hair – I'm quite accustomed to going to M&S to pick up a shirt, or even their long-johns, which I swear by.
But prints now cover the closed entrance doors and windows redirecting us all to the branch at Union Square, another symptom of the damage done to Union Street since the centre was opened.
Passersby continued their days in the sun seemingly with no reflection, avoiding the street theatre which has begun to occupy that part of the town, already gearing up to party at 10.30am, unlikely to improve any in the absence of M&S.
At least, by virtue of the nice weather, there were plenty of people going around.
But another hollowed out space in a street of hollowed out spaces with only minimal signs of improvement the further we get along the road. It would be easy to paint a depressing picture.
Yet, to pinch from T.S. Eliot again, it ain't The Wasteland yet. Aberdeen remains the largest and most economically important city in a very wealthy part of the world and the means to create opportunity from these challenges should be at our fingertips.
'What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish' – Eliot maybe was referring to the grievances of the granite city after all. We have to work out what will endure, as shopping increasingly turns online.
The answer is probably people, and we need to work out what will drag them, by hook or by crook, into town, as retail ebbs away, or retreats to sunnier climes like Union Square, where footfall appears pretty consistent.
You can't organically create a thriving city centre. Intervention is needed, as ultimately it was a different intervention that pulled people away.
A long-term plan for improved city centre living and bringing the upper floors of Union Street back into use is hugely promising – there's a lot of empty space up there, as there is on the deck, but a lot of work is needed.
Imagine though a renewed central boulevard of Union Street, reinvented and greened, which due to the city's geography will always run like a river through the heart of the city, flowing into North and South.
One where students and young professionals lived above, and nightlife, hospitality, arts and tourism thrived below. You'll say 'never' but it works in other places.
A bold plan for full pedestrianisation, where you might have to put up with bus gates for a bit longer, but the pay-off feels more worth it.
One which is well-connected by public transport and active travel routes to the refreshed beach.
The need for long-term vision and infrastructural change at the heart of Aberdeen has never been more apparent in my eyes.
And what then, of these empty spaces in this 'Unreal City'. The brooding long shadows of the Debenhams, John Lewis and Marks and Spencer, all imposing and fragile in their predicament, both permanent and not.
At the end of the day it's pretty binary. You either use them for something else, or you knock them down; tear them down or turn them over, because it's unlikely an all out resurgence of department sized stores is coming back.
On the day the closure of M&S was announced I popped in to M&S and went to the cafe with a pal, one with a keen interest in the arts and the regeneration of town centres. We both wondered what else it could be. The only answer is that it could be anything.
Colin Farquhar works as a creative spaces manager and film programmer in the north-east culture sector