Retail
West Bridgford's main shopping district runs from Central Avenue through Tudor Square to Gordon Road. Multiple retailers in the central area include Specsavers Opticians and Hearing centre, Vision Express, Boots, Greggs, a large Co-operative supermarket, Iceland, Blockbuster Video. Marks & Spencers opened a food supermarket in early 2006. These established chains complement a variety of independent specialist shops like Strawberry Blinds,Mark Bygott Intercounty Estate Agents, Guitar Base music store, hardware store Jayline, and No.8 Deli, and Jolie Lingerie, an independent lingerie store offering a specialist fitting service and designer lingerie.
Cafes include Caffè Nero and Philos, as well as the cafe, wine bar & bistro Belle and Jerome, pizza chains include Pizza Express and Italian restaurant Felicini as well as contemporary restaurants, typified by Five Rivers serving fusion Indian cuisine. Following refurbishment and street improvements in 2000, the quality of shopping in central West Bridgford has noticeably improved.
There are two food superstores in the area: Asda in West Bridgford and Morrisons in nearby Gamston.
West Bridgford has a place in British retail history as the location of the UK's first major out-of-town shopping development. In 1964, an American company called GEM opened a store on Loughborough Road. However, despite ambitious expansion plans, GEM's British operations were not a success, with only one other store (at Cross Gates, Leeds) being opened. National concessionaires withdrew from the stores and, in 1966, the fledgling Asda company (then known as 'Associated Dairies') of Leeds acquired a controlling interest in the GEM operations. The Loughborough Road site still houses a major Asda store, although it was resited and rebuilt some years ago. (For a fuller history of the site and GEM, see Whysall (2005) in International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 15(2), 111-124).
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