TWO retailers and a leisure operator will open at Swansea’s former Debenhams store next year, council chiefs have said.
The high street retailers will trade from subdivided units on the ground floor with the leisure venture on the floors above.
Their identities have not been made public yet by the council, which bought the empty Quadrant Shopping Centre store two years ago.
However a report before cabinet has confirmed that three new tenants have been secured and leases were due to be completed shortly.
Cabinet members will hear more about a programme of work to reconfigure and refurbish the building in readiness for its new occupiers.
The report said there was an element of urgency and cabinet will be asked to ensure funding is made available.
It said: “If commitment is not provided at the time of this report to complete the scheme then there is a significant risk that the current lettings will not proceed. Retail and leisure operators require certainty of delivery to commit resources to new locations.”
The report said the four-storey building was expected to be ready for fit-out by the tenants this autumn ahead of doors opening to customers early in 2026.
Speaking ahead of next Thursday’s cabinet meeting council leader Rob Stewart said: “We know how important the former Debenhams building is for local people and city centre businesses.
“That’s why we’ve been working tirelessly to attract retail and leisure tenants and reach a stage where refurbishment work can take place to prepare the building for occupation once again.”
The former Debenhams anchor store closed in 2021 when the company went into administration. The council bought it backed by £2.85m of Welsh Government funding. The purchase price was £3.15m with a further sum of just over £100,000 spent on professional fees and roof repairs.
In January last year Cllr Stewart said further support from Cardiff Bay had been provided to help reconfigure the building, taking the total Welsh Government funding to £4.5m.
The council is liable for business rates, insurance costs, and a Swansea BID (business improvement district) levy, which totalled just over £502,000 up until the end of March this year. The figure would have been considerably higher had a rateable value reassessment of the building not taken place.
It’s not clear how much the work to prepare the building for use will cost but the investment, said the cabinet report, was expected to be recovered over the lifetime of the lease.
The council owns the freehold of Quadrant Shopping Centre. A local company called Centurion took over a long lease from the previous lessee last year. Centurion has been credited with breathing new life into Swansea’s Parc Tawe retail park and said it planned to put the Quadrant, whose tenants including WHSmith, Boots, HMV, Goldsmiths and Superdry, back at the heart of the city centre.
Speaking last August Adam Gibbons, a Centurion executive, said: “We’d like to focus on increasing the footfall here and it’s about how we do that.
“On the surface, for the time being, things will look the same but in the background there’s going to be a lot of discussions. It will be a very busy few months. We don’t want to rush into it but at the same time we don’t want to sit on it for a year with nothing happening. We want to push things.”
Referring to the prospect of an occupied former Debenhams store he said: “That, in itself, is going to have a major impact not just on the Quadrant but the entire city.”
