History
The centre opened as The Eagle Centre on 20 November 1975 at a cost of £7,000,000. Several streets of terraced housing built in the early 1820s were demolished to make way for the new centre, including a street called Eagle Street, hence the name of the new development.
The centre's market was rebuilt in 1990 and the entire centre was refurbished in 1999.
A £340m extension to the Eagle Centre was opened on 9 October 2007 by TV celebrity Tess Daly. The extension sits on the site of the former Castlefields Main Centre, a dilapidated outdoor shopping centre already owned by Westfield. The extension doubled the size of the centre 51,559 m² (554,981 ft²) to 106,130 m² (1,142,383 ft²) . As well as adding many new retailers, the extension also houses an 800-seat foodcourt including a KFC outlet., a £30m twelve-screen Cinema de Lux and even more car parking facilities. Many retailers, including Debenhams, Marks and Spencers and Republic, closed their existing Derby stores to move to bigger stores in the extension. When the extension opened, the Eagle Centre was renamed to 'Westfield Derby' (in line with other Westfield shopping centres).
Read more about this topic: Westfield Derby
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)