Town centre development of indoor shopping malls in major towns and cities. Examples include the Manchester Arndale Centre, the St. James Centre in Edinburgh and the Bullring Centre in Birmingham. They tended to be constructed in a Brutalist or Modernist fashion reflecting the architectural styles of the period. During the Thatcher government of the 1980s, a change in planning policy allowed competing out-of-town shopping and leisure centres to be developed. Examples include the Metro Centre in Gateshead, the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in Dudley, and the Gyle Centre in Edinburgh. Developments of this type have, in a number of places, resulted in
Travel Merry Hill and it was completed in 1989). In the early days, the fleet consisted of Carlyle Works bodied Freight Rover Sherpa vehicles. An attraction to customers of the Merry Hill Minibus service was that the buses gave change to passengers not having the exact fare, which was not the case with the incumbent Travel West Midlands. The company intended to operate around 100 vehicles from the time of the centre's completion in November 1989, but stalled at 46 following the early 1990s recession. During 1997 Merry Hill Minibuses was taken over by West Midlands Travel's parent company National Express who continued