Making a quarter add up to very big numbers

The centre was built in the 1980s as an up-market retail destination after the once-vibrant Victorian arcade nose-dived into decay and became part of the poor end of town.

John Bade, centre director, said: "There was lot of negative publicity saying that they wanted to create a lot of posh shops but the idea was to bring things to Leeds that hadn't been brought before."

The Victoria Quarter, then owned by the Prudential, launched amid the last recession in September 1990, with just three shops.

Mr Bade said: "We'd missed the opening date twice and a lot of the stores we were talking to wanted to see us open before they moved.

"They didn't want to take the risk of moving to Leeds to a centre that wasn't established, on the wrong side of town, so that was quite difficult."

Refurbishing the arcade took longer than expected with problems surrounding new shop fronts, dry rot and fulfilling the regulations required for a shopping centre that was originally a street with cars and buses running through.

Mr Bade added: "In reality we bounced along the bottom of the recession. It wasn't easy but thankfully the Pru stuck by their guns and didn't dilute the tenant mix in order to let units quickly even though people came along with good offers."

The catalyst for attracting top names, according to Mr Bade, was when Jigsaw opened about 15 years ago. "Once we got Jigsaw, Hobbs and Karen Millen said they wanted to be there too and all of a sudden we had three really good names and it had become a fashion street", he said.

Since then, the Quarter has mirrored the Leeds city boom and attracted recognition from big name fashion houses like Harvey Nichols which chose to locate its first store outside of London there in 1996.

Mr Bade admits he hasn't always got the tenant mix right. A recent example was Arrogant Cat, which arrived two years ago but later closed down.

"I fought to have them here... and it didn't work.

"Sometimes, even with the big retailers, they have to take a step back and say 'this is what we've done in London but we'll have to adapt it for Leeds'," he said.

The Victoria Quarter is home to 76 retailers and has been fully-occupied for more than a year, unlike many shopping centres during the recession.

The centre attracts about 135,000 visitors a week, peaking at more than 200,000 over Christmas, and in December it reached another landmark, attracting over 1.1 million visitors during the month, up nearly 150,000 on the previous year.

Mr Bade said: "Our retailers have got through this recession but I wouldn't say they were riding high. It's up and down every day."

One of the toughest challenges is how to keep Victoria Quarter competitive as other northern cities attract the same retailers.

An additional task will be to keep its retailers when the new shopping centres, Trinity Leeds and Eastgate Quarter, come to fruition in the next few years.

But Mr Bade is optimistic about the future: "I really believe it's a necessity that the new centres come along because we will all benefit from it," he said.

"It may affect us short-term if retailers move to bigger stores but the difference is we've got a critical mass of this type of retailer and it would be a risk for them to move somewhere else."

BAZAAR BEGINNING OF ARCADES

It was once a mass of slaughter houses, butchers, and a bazaar but the beginnings of the Victoria Quarter, as we know it now, were at the beginning of the 19th century.

The eminent theatre architect Frank Matcham was brought in to create an elaborate arcade.

He used rich marbles, gilded mosaics, handsome casts and wrought iron, as well as carved and polished mahogany to create two streets, two arcades and the Empire theatre, now the site of Harvey Nichols, in 1900. But, despite its initial splendour, by the 1980s the arcade had nose-dived into decay until its owner Prudential revived the area with an investment of 6m.

The arcade was sold to Yorkshire entrepreneur Paul Sykes in 2001 for 45m in the wake of a review Prudential carried out into its property portfolio.

It was sold again in 2006 to Bank of Ireland Private Banking, on behalf of private clients, in a deal worth 126.1m.