With every passing announcement of the latest closure, nails are being hammered into the coffin of Croydon’s sadly declining Whitgift Centre.
Next nail in the coffin: Superdry in the Whitgift Centre is running a 50% off closing down sale
The latest exit is that of Superdry, the shop selling the premium British fashion brand that occupies a large, prestige site overlooking the central square.
Once Unit 153-155 of the Croydon shopping centre empties of Superdry, loyal customers will face a trek to Oxford Street, or to Kingston or Bromley, to try on the casualwear and 100% organic cotton jeans for which the brand is famous.
The store is currently operating a 50% off closing down sale – not unlike much of Croydon’s town centre shopping area, it seems.
The closure of Superdry follows Monsoon, Sainsbury’s and Body Shop among some of the premium brands to have quit Croydon’s once-renowned shopping centre.
“I’m surprised that the store persisted as long as it has, to be honest,” one erstwhile customer noted on social media.
“Footfall in Whitgift must be basically zero at this point. The only reason to go in is to walk to the bus stops on the main road.”
And another resident noted: “It’s a crying shame what has happened, really didn’t have to be that way at all.
“They’ve ripped the heart out of North End.”
It was in 2012 that Westfield were announced as the favoured developers of the Whitgift Foundation, the property company with charitable status which owns the shopping centre and large tracts of the town centre.
Everything must go: Superdry is the latest prestige brand to give up on Croydon
That original £1billion scheme was supposed to have been completed by 2017. But nothing has ever been delivered – apart from devastating development blight to Croydon town centre.
Westfield, now based in Paris as part of Unibail Rodamco Westfield, are now working on a new “masterplan” – their third for the area in 12 years – which has shifted its focus from retail to residential.
At least 3,000 flats are expected to be built on the site of the Whitgift Centre, with a bit of retail and the odd leisure facility or restaurant here or there. But that could take at least 15 years to complete, according to Westfield. So a development first announced 13 years ago now won’t be completed before 2050 – a 38-year-long saga. At least.
Croydon’s useless Mayor, Jason Perry, has championed two “meanwhile” uses of the long-vacant Allders store, close to where Superdry is about to close. But neither of Perry’s projects have yet amounted to anything.
Using parts of the former department store as a venue for “immersive” theatre from the millionaire founder of the Secret Cinema was quickly abandoned, depite being waved through the planning process by the Tory Mayor.
As an alternative, the best that Westfield and the council have come up with is seven “kiosks” in the Allders building – including yet more fast food outlets. But it was almost a year ago that this latest scheme was announced, and there has been nothing said more recently about any possible opening date, leaving large parts of North End closed off behind hoardings.
Inside Croydon has now had it confirmed by Roisha Hughes, the chief executive of the Whitgift Foundation, that the only way that any development in the town centre will proceed is with a multi-million-pound bail-out for the private scheme with housing grants provided by the Mayor of London and central government.
Read more: Perry’s council endorses scheme for 3,000 flats in town centre
Read more: Westfield boss says Croydon scheme could take 15 more years
Our 2014 warning: Council’s in a hole, and yet they still keep on digging
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
Superdry is the only legitimate closing down store in Croydon rn. The rest have had these closing down sales for years yet remained open. 🙂
The murals on the hoarding outside Allders and the bright pictures in the windows of the empty premises along George Street are a local adaptation of the “Potemkin village”.
Wikipedia tells us that this is “a construction whose purpose is to provide an external façade to a situation, to make people believe that the situation is better than it actually is.
The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, a field marshal and former lover of Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787.
The original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be seen again.”
Here in Croydon we have part-time Perry trying to fool the electorate into thinking prosperity is just around the corner. It’s not. What is around the corner is Millets camping shop in the High Street, which is either going or has already gone. The Post Office opposite is another business that’s not long for this world. To quote The Rime of the Croydon Retailer:
Shops, shops, every where,
And the footfall it did shrink;
Shops, shops, every where,
of KFC they stink
just knock the place down and give us back proper shops in a High Street
I wonder why anyone bothers to shop in Croydon these days.
Just hop on the 119 or SL5 and go to Bromley
Agreed. I’m sorry but…even the developers and land grabbers aren’t interested any more. How is anyone ever going to make money out of this place unless you’re talking about land grabbers who’ll buy up everything for next to nothing and wait for a time when…well, what? It’s a ghost town, a dead space with no hope of regeneration whilst the planners and the council persist in digging in instead of digging out.
Croydon has a desperately poor public image which persists along with incredibly negative news and media coverage of the area eg the bankrupt council, the stabbings, the pound shops and nail bars, the lack of culture, the lack of imagination exercised by town planners and the lack of education to help people understand what they can do to improve their living and working environment etc etc. where’s the good news? Another high rise? Mini Manhattan? Don’t make me laugh. Who wants to live in a glorified industrial estate? Who would ever want to visit? We need some authentic critical and creative thinking and a willingness to invest time, effort and bag loads of money for any hope of a positive future for this historic town.
The powers that be need start listening to residents in the area, not some meaningless box ticking measure like public consultations in which the public’s actual opinions are generally brushed off, but a real inquiry with surveys and public meetings in which people can report what is good/bad about their town area. They should then use this as a starting point to initiate projects that could actually bring this particular, diverse community back from the brink and thrive and grow organically. Rather than continuing to try and convince us that Croydon has what it takes, they need to look outside of the area at places that do it better. They talk about the diverse restaurant quarter, think instead of places like Kings Cross with its Vietnamese, Korean, Jamaican, Nigerian, Iranian, Mexican and Indonesian restaurants, The Croydon Mayor eulogises about our historic market, think instead about the amazing, authentically rich, diverse and vibrant Borough market, selling cheeses, breads, coffee and spices, a far cry from the bog standard fruit and veg we can buy cheaper elsewhere (it’s heaving there!). Brighton used to be horrible dirty and deprived, now it has streets and streets of ndependent shops. What aboutBrixton and Notting Hill, they don’t ignore their cultural diversity, they bask in it.
All over the country smaller towns than Croydon have rebuilt their high streets, blending beautiful, old heritage sites with glass and steel and create simply lovely spaces to sit and reflect in. Theses once down at heel areas have achieved what they have, not through ever increasing the numbers of high rise developments, office blocks and huge shopping centres, but through encouraging a diverse range of independent shops, restaurants and cafes into the area, creating pleasant space to shop and work, focus on the history, regenerate and restore the old pubs, cinemas and theatres instead of ripping out all the glorious historical features and sticking yet another express supermarket outlet in its place. Showcase the interesting architecture, providing spaces with interesting museums and cultural venues and attractions that bring young creative professionals into the area
I recently visited the Whitgift Centre to have a pearl necklace restrung at Samuels. There are no instructions for the car park machines, and as I didn’t realise my numberplate had already been photographed, I checked in to a machine when I parked and was told I had a few minutes in which I had to leave. I ignored this, when I did return to the machine to pay, I was told I had overstayed, and was then told how to pay by credit card. I have a blue badge, but I have no idea where my parking spaces are, or whether I would pay to use them, the system seemed too hostile to persevere.
There were several security guards at shop doorways. Boots didn’t even bother to open all their shutters, and I decided not to visit them, it felt a bit as if one was visiting a prison. Samuels were helpful but not busy. I looked in a few other windows, but found no shops which interested me. M&S had closed the ground floor entrance, and once I’d gone up the escalators and entered the upper M&S entrance the lighting was dim, and the layout confusing. I walked out to North End, but found that area uninspiring, too, and by then I needed to sit down so sought refuge in the M&Scafé.
I returned to collect the necklace a few days later, but still felt reluctant to explore further. I didn’t feel any justification for the long walks between such shops as were open. After decades of shopping in the Whitgift Centre, then my first choice for virtually anything I needed to buy, I won’t go back again. I am not surprised that Superdry is closing. There are just too few active shops to justify a visit. Instead I shall drive to Bromley, where my blue badge gives me 4 hours of free parking, there is plenty of seating in the mall when I get tired, and although there are empty units in The Glades, there are enough active shops to find most of what I want to try on or to buy. Anything else will be bought online and arrive in a day or two.
Is the Whitgift Centre, indeed Croydon town centre, just a dead horse which isn’t worth flogging?
Croydon centre is just fat, knackered white people dragging young screaming kids to McDonalds, and grotty roadmen. Knock the whole thing down. You can’t polish a turd.
They should just give up. Bulldoze the whole thing.
Perhaps it is because they’ve started fixing the roof on the Whitgift Centre that Superdry are leaving. Their marketing strategy of “It’s super dry in here. Come on in out of the leaks…” clearly doesn’t work anymore.
Don’t think I ever saw a customer in that massive Superdry store.
Worth pointing out though that the whole Superdry brand is struggling financially. It has a huge image problem as the only people who wear it are plain clothes police officers.
One significant deterrent to even getting to the Whitgift Centre is that the pedestrian underpass is still closed – it’s been closed all year. To reach southbound buses or East Croydon station is a long trek. Why and for how much longer?
Another example of our elected Mayor, Jason Perry, putting the wishes of private developers – Westfield – ahead of the interests of public safety, the public and those businesses still clinging on for survival in the Whitgift Centre.
In 2013, the Council drew up a Connected Croydon Delivery Plan, which included a pedestrian and cyclist crossing over Wellesley Road, at the junction of Lansdowne Road. Principal funders were to be Croydon Council and the
Greater London Authority.
In the 2023 LIP Delivery Plan and Evidence, that project was mentioned again, as part of the 2024/5 Programme and the focus on the Mayor’s Business
Plan aim to support the regeneration of Croydon’s town and district centres.
The problem now seems to be who will pay for it. URW were going to chip in, according to a council press release in September 2024.
Then a Planning Committee report of February 2025 referred to the Whitgift Centre Compulsory Purchase Order Indemnity and Land Transfer Agreement. This involved a contribution by URW with matched funding for the Reconnected Croydon project, “anticipated on site in Autumn 2025. It would facilitate the closure of the subway, which would remove a hotspot that requires significant resource to manage.”
The latest, in March 2025, was the planning application from the developer behind the twin towers to be built at the corner of Wellesley and Lansdowne. They are meant to make a “Sustainable Transport financial contribution of £1,124,000 (to include surface level pedestrian crossing on Wellesley Road)”.
It will be great when it finally happens, but needlessly closing the subway before putting in the crossing was a case of putting the cart before the horse.
3000 new flats….. so that’s around 3000-10000 more people crammed into a place with no shopping, doctors or dentists. Lobotomies must be part of the recruitment process in the council.
Also, imagine WANTING to live in Croydon. Inexplicable.
MORE LIKE THE SHITGIFT CENTRE.
Get someone to show you how to turn the caps lock off, Jamie
You could do what I do – pull the caps lock key off and throw it away. Job DoNe. MS Word allows you to switch text to upper and lower and back using Shift+F3
Footfall would increase if there were enough shops open to justify a visit. It’s appalling that the area has been purposely left to rot. It used to be a great place to go to for a good day out. Shop in the whitgift, have a meal and watch a film or visit the theatre. The shops that are persisting must really be on their last legs with each passing day and closure announcement. The area is a total embarrassment, a ghost town, along with Sutton high street. New flats are not what is needs in that space, its vision and high quality retail spaces. A reduction in business rates and rates would encourage independent businesses to set up. What about another box park in the area too. Consultation with local community, residents and the surviving businesses would be invaluable. Why is the Mayor of London getting involved? Perry is an utter failure. The people of Croydon deserve more.
What’s wrong with Sutton high street? It’s in a much better shape.
Also, no religious preachers