HE led the opposition to Castlepoint, warning that a shopping park with 3,000 free parking spaces so near Bournemouth would hurt the town centre.

And while former Bournemouth council leader Douglas Eyre does not quite say “I told you so”, he thinks councillors should be showing some “tender loving care” to central Bournemouth.

“Ramping up parking charges every five minutes” will not help a town centre suffering from soaring costs and a string of high-profile store closures, he said.

Mr Eyre, who once declared that he might be the only Bournemouth resident not to have visited Castlepoint, led a Liberal Democrat administration at Bournemouth Borough Council from 1991-99.

The Hampshire Centre shopping destination at Strouden Park was lined up for redevelopment, but opponents did not want it replaced with a park full of high street names.

“We were hoping it would become a white goods type of estate and not a full retail estate,” Mr Eyre says now.

The council opposed a planning application, but the developer appealed and went all the way to a public enquiry before the authority reluctantly surrendered. A second application in 1998 triggered the same debate all over again.

Mr Eyre said his concern was that “it was too close to the centre of town and that would have a detrimental effect on the Square”.

While Castlepoint was still being planned, the council focused on the town centre, pedestrianising the Square and appointing Bournemouth’s first town centre manager to lobby for the area and bring traders and council together.

“It was an attempt to try and make the Square stronger,” he said.

Castlepoint opened in 2003, offering the largest branches of Next, Marks & Spencer and B&Q in the region alongside a host of other big names, and offered regular late-night opening.

It attracted 50million shopping visits in five years and was said to have taken 15 per cent of the town centre’s trade, as well as hitting car parking income.

Mr Eyre remembers going with the council’s then-director of development services to meet representatives from Marks & Spencer about their concerns for the town.

“We met one of the very senior management and they said ‘There’s no way we would ever leave Bournemouth town centre’,” he said.

“They said we ‘Will be there forever, we will always be in Bournemouth town centre’."

M&S eventually closed its town centre store in 2018.

“It took them a long time to move, but they did," said Mr Eyre.

He still believes the town centre can be an attractive shopping destination.

“The attraction of gardens running right through the city, as people call it, is something special which works well as a shopping destination but with online shopping it’s not sufficient to make things feasible,” he said.

“It needs a lot of TLC from the council, that would be my thought. Don’t just keep going forward and ramping up parking charges every five minutes and expecting trade to come back in.”

But the man who once refused to visit Castlepoint has since relented.

“I can’t now claim I’m the one person in Bournemouth who hasn’t visited Castlepoint,” he said.

“It’s very convenient. I’ve got a granddaughter who works there part-time. I go to drop her off and pick her up and it’s easy.”