Merry Hill Shopping Centre store by well over a decade, only closing when the retailer went into liquidation over the 2008/09 winter. The completion of Merry Hill resulted in the loss of many big name retailers from nearby town centres, with Dudley arguably being the hardest hit, suffering a 70% decline in retailing market share following Merry Hill's opening. However, some retailers kept their stores in nearby towns open, despite opening new stores at Merry Hill. WH Smith, who have been at Merry Hill since 1989, still have a store in Halesowen, and even opened a new store in Stourbridge during the 1990s. The
Bluewater (shopping centre) Bluewater (shopping centre) Bluewater Shopping Centre (commonly referred to as Bluewater) is an out-of-town shopping centre in Stone (postally Greenhithe), Kent, England, outside the M25 Orbital motorway, east south-east of London's centre. Opened on 16 March 1999 in a former chalk quarry after ten years of building works, the site including car parks occupies and has a sales floor area of 154,000 m (1,600,000 ft) over three levels, making it the fifth-largest shopping centre in the UK (after Westfield London, MetroCentre, Trafford Centre and Westfield Stratford City). Elsewhere in Europe only Istanbul's Cevahir Mall and Vienna's (Vösendorf) Shopping City Süd