Character Assessment Area No 19 - Fareham Shopping Centre
The Fareham shopping Centre forms the northern half of the primary retail core of the town centre and is located on the north side of West Street.
This purpose built indoor shopping
centre comprising a variety of retail shops and food courts. The
units are laid out along internal streets and squares. These link
the community and civic uses on the north side with the
pedestrianised West Street to the south. This provides a good
level of permeability but this is curtailed outside of normal
retail hours, which creates a significant degree of severance
within the town centre. The south side creates an external street
frontage with retail units facing onto and accessed from West
Street. There are numerous shop units within the centre of
various widths which creates a fine and continuous rain. However
externally, the structure is read as a single large block above
ground floor which erodes this fine grain.
Internally the scale on the units is single storey with a ceiling at the same level (except for the glazed food courts). Externally the building is two storeys with office space above. This is not unrelated to the general character of the street which has a mixed variety of buildings.
The mass of the
building is large compared to development of earlier periods and
reflects the extent of the land ownership and economies of scale
in developing a large site. The entrance 'portico's on
West Street help to break up this mass.
The building is essentially one flat roof structure and comprises a mixture of brick and concrete material. Parapet detailing and the use of brick arch details help to create visual interest.
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