Urban Outfitters, Lakeside
A full retail fit out at one of the UK's largest out-of-town shopping centres.
Urban Outfitters opened its doors at Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex on Thursday 6 August. It is the brand's first store at the centre, and McCue delivered the full fit out.
The project
The existing unit on the lower level was taken back to shell and a new store built from there.
The scope covered everything: partitions and structural alterations, full mechanical and electrical, sprinkler and HVAC alterations, timber flooring, sales floor joinery, and a new shopfront in steel and brickslips with a new shutter. A new mezzanine floor with a goods lift was installed, with fitting rooms formed above it.
Fit out ran from strip out at the start of April through to turnover in late June, with the mezzanine and fitting room phase following on behind.
Working in a live centre
Lakeside trades seven days a week. That shapes how a job like this gets built long before anyone is on site.
Materials come in through shared service routes. Access is shared with every other tenant and every other contractor working in the scheme. Noisy and heavy operations get scheduled around the centre rather than around the programme — the mezzanine floor and staircase, for example, went in on nightshift.
None of that is unusual in retail. But it does mean the programme has to be built around the centre's constraints from day one, not adjusted for them later.
Why this store matters
Lakeside has been repositioning itself. The centre reports that brand partners have invested more than £100 million in new shop fits over the past three years, with Next and JD upsizing, an enhanced M&S, and Bershka, The White Company and Hollister arriving.
Urban Outfitters is part of that shift — a brand the centre had been working to attract, aimed at a younger customer, and a signal of where the scheme is heading.
For McCue, it is a project delivered inside an active investment programme rather than a one-off. That is the environment we build in most often: occupied, trading, and commercially live.