Also, unlike most largish cities there is not an influx of office workers to the centre every day. Plymouth remains a manufacturing and engineering rather than a professional services city and manufacturing jobs are not based in the centrePlymouth City Centre is turgid for two reasons.
Firstly, nobody lives in in the City Centre. Go to Exeter, go to Cardiff, go to Bristol, go to Cheltenham, go to Bath, there are houses and flats mixed in with the City Centre in those places, that means there’s a local and a collective desire to maintain and improve those City Centre’s.
Secondly, there are very few cafes/restaurants/bars in Plymouth City Centre, there’s no real entertainment scene, it’s just a concrete jungle of shops. You don’t go into the City Centre for a day out or a night out in the same way that you do in some of the cities listed above.
I know and appreciate that the City Centre is being revamped at the moment aesthetically but ultimately nothing will really change in terms of it’s appeal and utility.
Thankfully we have the Barbican, the Hoe and Royal William Yard to fall back on.
For a couple of decades after the re-construction I think Plymouth was a genuine regional shopping destination and one of the top shopping areas in the country (it remains one of the largest - albeit now half empty) and a trip to Plymouth shopping was something people all over Devon and Cornwall did. Pedestrianisation seemed to start to suck the life out of the place and of course with the advent of the internet it never recovered. Exeter took over as Devon and Cornwall's main shopping destination.
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