A PLANNED $1.5 million development at booming Eglinton is not just a sign of how the village is changing, it's a new chapter in the story of the city's spreading retail centres.
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The Western Advocate reported recently that businessmen brothers Manpreet and Manjit Singh have bought the Eglinton General Store and are planning a makeover and expansion that they hope will begin in the coming months.
Their vision is to turn the business into a 400 to 500 square metre supermarket (as part of the SPAR chain) to service the booming Eglinton population.
The announcement of their plans comes just over 25 years since the Westpoint Shopping Centre opened in the city's expanding Windradyne area and about 20 years after the Trinity Heights Shopping Centre's doors swung open at Kelso.
Westpoint initially featured five shops and a 240 square metre supermarket before another three shops were added, the supermarket space was doubled to 440 square metres and a bottleshop and medical centre were introduced to the site two years later.
The supermarket expanded again, to 900 square metres, as part of the multi-million-dollar redevelopment of the shopping centre that officially opened in mid-2020.
A statement of environmental effects lodged with council for the Westpoint redevelopment project said it was proposed in order "to enhance the status of the centre and to establish it as a shopping and convenience hub for West Bathurst".
In another part of the city, as council prepares for more than 2000 new homes in the Laffing Waters precinct, a masterplan created for the area has identified a tract of land that will in the future accommodate a supermarket, specialty stores and additional community facilities.
In terms of the CBD, the $70 million Bathurst City Centre and the new Woolworths supermarket built as part of it are still relatively recent additions, having opened less than 15 years ago.
"Having Woolworths as an anchor tenant is a bonus," developer Sam Restifa said in March 2009 as the finishing touches were made to the complex.
"They have a state-of-the-art 4200-square-metre presence. They are in the process of stocking shelves and their store has to be seen to be believed."
And the Bernardi's IGA in lower Rankin Street, built on the site of the former Bathurst Automotive Group premises, opened in October 2012 after about a year of construction.
In terms of the Eglinton plans, the Singh brothers say they hope to expand the existing general store into the unit that is part of the current building as well as take the store further into the large block at the back.
"We could have started [the business] as it is," Manpreet Singh told the Advocate.
"But I don't want that. Then you eventually have to close again for the renos and people will be cranky, [saying] 'what's going on?'.
"I said go with the big picture."
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