Iceland in move to former Beatties store
Monday 23rd August 2010, 11:30AM BST.
Frozen food chain Iceland is to take over Dudley’s landmark Beatties store, it has been revealed today.
The firm will move into the empty unit in the Churchill shopping centre on December 2.
The 10,000sq ft, three-storey building has been closed since January 31.
It is believed Iceland will only move into the ground floor of the site, though no official plans have been released yet.
The announcement gives new hope for the future of the town centre, which has been hit by a number of shop closures in recent years.
Deputy Dudley Council leader Les Jones today welcomed the news and said it would “drive forward the economic regeneration of Dudley”.
He said: “Iceland must see an opportunity to do good business there so they must expect to attract plenty of customers, which will be good for the town.”
Beatties was one of the last remaining big names in the town when it closed on January 31 after 40 years of trading.
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If that’s good news for Dudley, I’m Liberace’s love child.
Cheapo foodstores are the one thing Dudley already has in plentiful supply. And you can’t have proper town without a department store.
If Iceland uses only one floor of the four storey building, what happens to the rest of it? I can’t see many retailers wanting to lease the upper storeys, which won’t have a shop front.
I suppose there’s not much anyone can do if the landlord and the tenant reach an agreement, but it would have been better for the town for the building to have remained empty until another a more appropriate retailer came forward.
Where are the people of Dudley supposed to buy their clothes from?
I fear this is the death sentence for Dudley, and cements the council’s vision as it becoming an insignificant, second division hick town. And no doubt the Merry Hill management will be laughing their heads off.
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Of course its the council with its ridiculous high parking charges and neglect of the town who drove everyone away in the first place….
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totally agree with boster, the old beatties would be ideal for something like t.j.hughes.
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I don’t know if Boster lives in Dudley, but Beatties is not the place where most people went to buy their clothes, too pricey for most…!
Also Dudley died a long time ago with the creation of Merry Hill, along with other surrounding towns.
Need to give Dudley a bit of its history back, The Black Country Museum thrives because it appeals to the heritage of the area, even though they have to save building from destruction and move them because the surrounds are took up by “cheap-o” brand stores. Dudley has a 1,000 year history and some of that should be reflected in the shop fronts and style of the town, but with the 60s regeneration which was cosmetic butchery to the town (similar to Birmingham New Street and the Bull Ring) it has become out of fashion and unappealing to tourists and town-folk alike. Could be very easy to create a tourist hotspot if Dudley was to appeal to its heritage and created something similar to Warwick (which also has a castle and pulls in plenty of tourist from around the world)…..
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Yes Jason, Boster does live in Dudley. I live in Sedgley these days, previously in Woodsetton and Foxyards. And, like many other people in Dudley, I did buy my clothes from Beatties, at least I did until House of Fraser screwed it up with all their awful own-brand lines.
Which set of statistics is your suggestion that Beatties is too pricy for the people of Dudley based on? The average household income for Dudley is higher than that for Wolverhampton, Walsall, or West Bromwich, yet Wolverhampton manages to sustain its branch of Beatties, and Walsall manages to support a decent town centre. Why should the people of Dudley, Britain’s second biggest town, be expected to accept a second division town centre?
You are totally right that Merry Hill is the cause of Dudley’s decline, but we have to stop thiking about the past and look to the future. Like any other building, Merry Hill has a time-limited lifespan; if the council and the government had the guts to say it will never again be rebuilt, redeveloped or expanded (in keeping with the Government’s 1995 planning guidelines Viable and Vital Town Centres), then it will inevitably wither on the vine – maybe not in our lifetime, but it will die out sooner or later. If that happened, and retailers were given the choice of returning to Dudley town centre, or simply not being represented in Britain’s second biggest town, I suspect at least some of them would go for the former.
All the talk of tourism is well and good, but name me a major town which has tourism as the centrepiece of its economic strategy; you talk about Warwick, but that is a town a quarter the size of Dudley.
There are lots of towns with a 1,000 year history, but the good ones are the ones that have adapted to the times. It breaks my heart to read about the massive developments planned for Walsall, Wolverhampton and even West Bromwich, while in Dudley all we have to look forward to is a new freezer centre, and people keep droning on about heritage.
You can’t buy your clothes from Iceland, and you can’t buy them from a castle, either.
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