Gloucester re-imagined - Kings Square

I visited Gloucester this week whilst my car was being serviced. As a child and a teenager and most of my adult life, Gloucester has been our nearest City and with child 1 living there also, it's somewhere we still visit.

I don't like Gloucester City Centre and usually prefer to spend my time on the outskirts. But as a teen I would go to the cinema, to the left of this photo and loved nothing more than shopping in Debenhams which is to my right.

Gloucester has seen a lot of development over the years with the docks being turned into shopping, restaurants and apartments and new retail parks being established. There are quite a few empty stores/buildings in the city since the closure of BHS amongst others.

Kings Square used to have seating, water features and I remember the stepping stones over the water. It's been an ice rink, held small funfairs, markets etc, but in 2006 they drained the water after vandalism and this week it looked like this.

The plans as seen below appear to be to reintroduce the water features to the area, but I've no idea of the timescale involved.

This is what it looked like in 1979 photo used from Gloucestershire Live. I've taken my photo from the right of Debenhams department store, looking back this way.

It'll be a while before I go back into the City centre, but It'll be interesting to see how it develops and how long it takes.

Have you visited this area? Do you remember it looking like this?