Princes Street could be turning a corner, at long last - Jeremy Grant

Take a walk down Princes Street in Edinburgh – as tourists and locals are doing this weekend – and pretty soon you will be asking: what has happened to this place?

At one end there is the Victorian splendour of Jenners, the former department store once dubbed “The Harrods of the North”, closed since 2021. A few blocks west we find a graffiti-strewn “American Candy” store, and the bargain-basement offerings of “Pound & Beyond”.

Other than London’s Oxford Street, there can be few thoroughfares in Britain where the fortunes of the high street are more starkly on display. But there is an added poignancy to Princes Street. It is an allegory of Scottish architectural decline, written in retail.

Hundreds of shoppers queued on Princes Street hours before the opening of Scotland's first UNIQLO store earlier this year

And yet, could this collection of 43 buildings along a strip that began in the late 18th century as a row of terraced houses for Edinburgh’s wealthy, finally be turning a corner?

There are encouraging signs. In 2021, drinks group Diageo opened The Johnnie Walker Experience at an art deco former department store on the street’s western tip. In April this year, Japanese apparel retailer Uniqlo opened its first store in Scotland a few doors down from Jenners, signalling “an opportunity to bring life back to this iconic shopping street”.

Yet the future will not involve a full retail revival. “That ship has sailed for Princes Street,” says Murray Strang, Scotland managing partner at real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield (C&W).

Blame a double-whammy of pandemic hollowing out and a shift by big brands to the St James Quarter shopping centre and Multrees Walk, a high-end retail cluster where Gucci will soon open its first store outside London.

Jeremy Grant is a freelance writer and editor, and was a journalist at the Financial Times and Reuters for 25 years

Instead, Princes Street looks set to be defined by what real estate jargon calls “mixed use”, involving hotels, restaurants, bars, offices and “destination” shops – such as Uniqlo and the big Apple store opposite the Balmoral Hotel.

There are signs of investor confidence in this proposition, if the handful of hotel developments under way is anything to go by. Take “100 Princes Street”, a 30-room boutique hotel that opened four months ago in the former Royal Overseas League building, dating from 1879. It’s part of the Red Carnation collection started by the late South African hotelier Stanley Tollman. A double room with a view of Edinburgh Castle starts at £725 per night.

C&W notes that Edinburgh’s hotel sector outperformed the UK national average in terms of revenue growth, rising by 22 per cent in the first quarter, compared with the same quarter a year earlier.

The big driver is tourism. Two-thirds of visitors to Edinburgh are from abroad, and the numbers are growing. Edinburgh Airport has seen a 110 per cent rise in international arrivals since 2019.

The turning point for Princes Street will probably have to wait for the reopening of Jenners, owned since 2017 by Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen. The nine-storey building, dating from 1895, is to be transformed into a 100-room hotel, restaurant, bar and 7,000 square metres of retail space.

“People’s perceptions of Princes Street need to change,” says Roddy Smith, head of Essential Edinburgh, a membership organisation of city centre businesses, “because it will never go back to the way it used to be.”

Jeremy Grant is a freelance writer and editor, and was a journalist at the Financial Times and Reuters for 25 years.