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
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“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)