When you think of shopping in Aberdeen, your mind might immediately go to one of the city’s numerous shopping centres.
Some of the most popular places to shop and eat, they offer a range of places under one roof.
But like the high streets, our shopping centres have not been immune to the difficult retail situations of the past few years.
Tough times for Aberdeen shopping centres
The Bon Accord Centre has been recently bought over in a multi-million-pound deal.
Meanwhile the Trinity Centre was put up for sale in September 2022.
But how are shopping centres in Aberdeen currently faring? We’ve drawn out all the floor plans for each of the four shopping centres in Aberdeen, mapped out and tracked each of the units in them to see how many units are currently occupied, and how many are vacant.
By hovering over each unit, you will be able to access further information, such as the name of the business that currently occupies the unit, as well as what type of business it is.
For those that are currently empty, hovering over the unit will give information about what used to be in that site, as well as roughly how long it has been closed for.
We have also tracked vacancy rates for each of the centres as businesses enter or leave units, as well as the average vacancy rates across all centres.
Categories include shopping, food and drink, hair and beauty, health and wellbeing, banking, gambling, entertainment and other services, and although some units may fit into multiple categories, one has been picked for each open location.
With this data, we aim to give an overview of the shopping centres in Aberdeen, the shops and restaurants that are open, and the types of units that occupy them.
Bon Accord Centre
The Bon Accord Centre is split into two parts, the below maps include the first and second floor of the bigger centre, and the lower floor only of the smaller section that was previously known as the St Nicholas Centre.
The below maps show the units in both halves of the Bon Accord Centre.
Only the lower floor has been included of this half of the Bon Accord Centre, as the only currently accessible unit upstairs is an office.
Union Square shopping centre
Union Square is Aberdeen’s newest shopping centre, and is packed full of both retail stores and restaurants.
Trinity Centre shops
The Trinity Centre is located centrally and overlooks the newly refurbished Union Terrace Gardens.
For this tracker the inside of The Academy shopping centre was not included, as only the outdoor units are occupied, and you cannot currently walk into the centre.
You can see the centre on our high street shops tracker, under the Schoolhill and Belmont Street map. There you will also find data on a number of the main shopping streets in Aberdeen.
Methodology
For each of the shopping centres, a copy of the floor plan was obtained and each unit was hand drawn out using Figma, to create an SVG of the floor plan. From there, an on foot census was carried out to check the floor layout and see which units were open or closed.
Vacant units were then checked to see what was previously in that space, using a mixture of newspaper articles and other various sources such as review websites.
As such, some of the dates given for stores may not be fully accurate. As a result, all data should be taken as an estimation as it was collated manually by the data team.
Can you help us keep our tracker up to date?
All of the data included within our high street tracker is collected manually by the data team and reporters in Aberdeen, and includes units opening and closing we’ve written articles on, as well as things we’ve noticed while out on foot in the area. Our last open dates may be estimates based on the best information we could find.
But we know we might not always spot everything, or get every closure date right.
We appreciate all the support we’ve received for our trackers so far, and would love if you would like to help us keep it up to date.
If there’s anything you spot opening or closing you’d like us to know about, or if you have more accurate information on closing dates of units or what the last business to occupy a unit was, you can let us know using the form below.
