Show us your ... retail parks

[DavidBrown 0]

Couldn't find anything like this, though I am prepared to be proved wrong!

Not sure how common they are in the USA (I would think fairly common since most of the downloads used are American!), but the UK has lots of out of town shopping centres - not necesarily indoor malls as such, but purpose built parades of large retail units. Here's what I mean - this is from my city of Exton.



Mortehoe Shopping Park is located just off junction 3 of the M6 motorway on the very edge of the city. It boasts 20 leading stores, 4 restaurants, 2 supermarkets and petrol and railway stations. Over 5000 people are employed, and 3 million shoppers a year fill the 2700 space car park and spend around £1 billion every year. The site was built in 1994 amongst protests from retailers in Exton city centre, who feared that business would be severely affected, and local residents who feared traffic congestion.




Mortehoe Park has many of the well known brands in the UK - Tesco, B&Q, Staples, ASDA (Wal-Mart) and Pizza Hut amongst others.







OK, it's not exactly like a standard UK retail park - the lack of pretty much any UK BAT's doesn't help! Hopefully you should get the idea though.

[autoVino 26]

Oh yeah, they're common in America, but in Europe they seem to be much larger with huge department stores. As far as I've seen in America it's either around a large mall, shopping plaza, or some large store such as Target, Home Depot, or Walmart.

[Follarch 327]

That's a pretty nice shopping center. I agree every good american city has one of those puppy's. Though it seems pretty...out of nowhere, did you just build it for posting it here? I would expect that somewhere closer to civilization.

[Godzillaman 21]

Archean: Suburban expansion will probably eat it up...

[JakeMD 107]

Looks pretty good, I wish I had some to show.

[masochist 111]

There are two huge Outlet Centers right next to each other in San Marcos, TX set up just like the one you showed, and it's on the outskirts of the town to accommodate for the huge amount of space it takes up.

[intensivecarebear 0]

nice work. I have a question. In the second pic, how did you get the single roads to connect to the roundabout?

[DavidBrown 0]

Thanks for the comments.

Archean - it does appear very rural, but it is on the edge of a large city on a major motorway, which they tend to be over here. As Godzillaman points out, it will probably be a large suburb soon!

intensivecarebear - all I did for the roads was drag them two game tiles into the roundabout. For me it only works for roads and one way roads, and it has to be on the very edge of the roundabout as having a single road in the centre two tiles will cause the roundabout textures to go funny.

[DFire870 2]

Yeah, they're pretty common here in the US, but there are (IMO) three different types: malls, open-air shopping centers, and outlet malls. The malls are essentially a giant box with all of the stores inside and parking lots surrounding it. The open-air shopping centers are similar to the one you posted, but they're a little smaller, and are anchored by one or two, sometimes three, big-box stores (depending on the size of the center). Then there are outlet malls which are like what you posted, but there's not usually any "main store", they're all roughly the same size and have designer brands for lower prices. Some can be arranged where you have rows of these stores with the parking in the middle, and some are like malls where you have all of the stores clustered in one space, with parking lots surrounded around.

The open-air shopping centers are the smallest and are located almost everywhere in cities, with malls there's not quite as many, and outlet malls are located in the outskirts. The San Marcos Outlet Malls, like masochist pointed out, are located in the middle of nowhere (well, they WERE, but now there's quite a bit around them) because they get so many people there (they basically triple the population of San Marcos during peak season).

Wow, I rambled a bit there...