Wall St Mall

I finally went into the new 'Wall St' mall yesterday here in Dunedin. Quirky, it ain't.

It's fronted by several clothes shops - all those trendy sort of places that only certain people go in, I presume. I presume this on the basis of the fact that there never seems to be many people in them. Inside there's lot of space, and very little else: the cafe was doing quite good business, as it should in a lunch hour. There's a large chemist's shop right at the back, a tinky-tonk gift shop (tinky-tonk being one of my former bosses word for trivial junk), something else which I've forgotten (oh, yes, yet another Vodafone shop - making three within spitting distance of each other), and that was pretty much it.

Lots of versions of the Wall St slogan, which goes something like: Now you don't have to leave the place you love to shop. If it sounds obscure, well, it pretty much is. Are we to imply that the place we love is the Wall St mall? I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many Dunedinites to love this mall. There's very little to love. It's light and airy, and there's some sort of 'feature' in the centre by the cafe, and the pharmacy looks very glitzy, but....?

I went up the two flights of stairs to see if there was anything else going on. The first flight basically takes you to the office area, where Fisher and Paykel staff are fully visible at their work. The second flight takes you to....nothing. Exits to the outside world, and currently restricted to Tradesmen.

Eventually the mall will run into the Golden Centre which runs into the Meridian. One Large Mall. My suspicion is that the Wall St bit will be the poor relation of the three on the basis of its current lack of customers.

The picture of Wall St's frontage comes from a blog hosted by Jia Yih, a Malaysian student living in Dunedin. Check out his blog; he's got some great pictures.