What used to be a flourishing and bustling shopping centre has now been rendered a deserted building with more empty lots than occupied ones. With scaffolding blocking off large sections of the mall and bright yellow boxes arranged on the patterned floor to collect roof leakage, we find ourselves asking: what happened?
Whitgift Centre, owned by the Whitgift Foundation and opened in 1968 is situated in the heart of Croydon and is a household name for those living in and around the area. For a long time after its opening, it had remained the largest shopping centre in Greater London, attracting visitors from all over the region.
I, as a teenager who has lived in Croydon my whole life, vividly remember just how vibrant and jovial days out shopping there with my mum would be. However, now, with both the lion-faced fountain and the stream of shoppers having run dry, it seems that the Centre has neared the end of its staggeringly declining prominent position as a major shopping hub in Croydon.
The plans for Westfield, which began in 2012, have yet to be completed, with delays and extensions constantly being asked for. This indecision and ambiguity in what exactly the final goal is and how it would be achieved has been consistently driving away all the shop owners in the mall. And for those that remain, they and their employees are wracked and plagued with uncertainty about whether or not they even have a future at their job. It is incredibly disheartening to see the sheer number of empty units for if it were 10 years ago, businesses would’ve been competing to occupy one of these units whereas now it appears that all the lingering businesses are in a race to vacate the somewhat doomed centre. Unfortunately it seems that we will only be seeing more of these barren lots as every other day, another shop has ‘CLOSING DOWN! SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!’ displayed on banners of assaulting colours on the windows.
I spoke to Venkatesh Nair, who works at one of the shops which has become a staple of Whitgift but now faces an unprecedented future.
I asked him for a comment on what it was like to be working at a shop in the mall - ‘There’s basically no job security, like we have a shop today and tomorrow it might be closing down… We’re losing most of the shops so there’s practically no business and people are just not coming here anymore… When I started working here, it would be really packed but now it’s almost Christmas and it’s still very slow… it’s really sad.’
When asked about the Westfield plans falling through, he said that they should have just ‘gotten it over and down with but now we’re stuck in a limbo. We don’t know if we’re still staying or going.’ Venkatesh confides that ‘[he doesn’t] even come to Croydon to shop anymore, [he’d] rather go to Bromley.’
Even when asking Nair for a comment or taking the pictures shown above, I was filled with a genuine and deep-rooted sadness upon seeing the sheer extent to which Whitgift Centre has fallen from its former glory. Few people still hold out hope for the shopping mall, and I consider myself among those few but it seems that all signs point to a forsaken building that it is a mere shell of what it was and what it could’ve been.
