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
Merry Hill Shopping Centre were trading from the site. In November of that year, the Richardson twins announced plans to expand Merry Hill into a large indoor shopping centre to rival the recently completed developments at Telford in Shropshire and Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, with a view to completing the development by 1990. The building contract for the shopping malls was let to Tarmac Construction. The first shopping centre and a second phase of the retail park (including Halfords and B&Q which is now Toys R Us) opened in April 1986 (incorporating the Carrefour hypermarket which opened on 1 July that year). However, Carrefour