Of late, leisure centres have undergone something of a renaissance. No more the ugly, garish out-of-town container sheds that once encircled British towns and cities and served as the butt of suburban jokes for a generation of disparaging metropolitan elites.

Now, leisure centres are frequently subsumed within shopping centres with genuine architectural ambition, as evident at schemes like Victoria Gate in Leeds, Arc Bury St Edmunds and, to a degree, the two mighty Westfield shopping centres that signpost east and west London.

But every now and then an unrepentant relic of yesteryear slips through the net. And one of the biggest and most recent of this unhappy breed is £45m Redrock Stockport just south of Manchester. Redrock contains all of the obligatory consumerist paraphernalia one would expect of a town centre leisure complex. Ten-screen cinema, restaurants, bars, retail and a 340 space multi-storey car park across 75,000ft² of space.

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