Jonathon Wardman

Westgate Aldershot: Spot the Difference

The long awaited Westgate ‘leisure complex‘ in Aldershot officially opened on the 26th October 2012. For the first weekend the only thing open in the complex was the cinema, with Morrisons opening the Monday after.

Having watched the development being built just over the road from where I live and reviewed the planning applications in some detail I was curious to see how close the final product to the promotional pictures actually were. So I went out on the 4th November to try to reproduce the concept images in real life. I’ll add a few updates as the restaurant units fill up over the next couple of months.

See if you can spot the difference…

Travelodge Hotel (south-east corner):

Very similar. Some of the landscaping isn’t quite as impressive as predicted and the road and paving are slightly different.

Morrisons Supermarket (southern entrance to development):

Again very similar except for landscaping differences and some cosmetic changes to the paneling on Morrisons. The landscaping down to the development at this point is simply grass without the illustrated planting (although admittedly these photos were taken in November, not summer).

Harvester (looking south-east, back to Morrisons):

At this point, on this weekend, I couldn’t get as far back as I would have liked because of construction work. You can see from this image that the benches are a considerably different design to the illustration, and that the architect’s images did not include the lighting which has been installed in reality.

Cineworld (looking north-west into development):

Again in this image you can see the lighting missing from the illustrations. There are also differences in the location of the planting boxes (note the trees are there, just hard to spot on my images).

The following two images were based on a couple of additional images available on the development’s website until recently. I can’t now find a copy of these images to do a comparison. If you have a copy it would be great to get hold of them.