Buchanan Galleries is a shopping centre located in the central area of Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland. Construction began in 1996 and the building opened to the public on 31 March 1999. Costing £250 million, it is one of the largest city centre shopping developments in the United Kingdom, boasting an internal retail space of nearly 56,000 m². The building also incorporates the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Its anchor tenant is John Lewis which occupies all of the northern side of the complex, including part of the car park area which it uses as a customer collections point. The Galleries is located on the junction between the famous Glaswegian shopping streets of Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street, a previously run down area full of derelict buildings (the site was once the home to the Glasgow branch of the NAAFI), and half-abandoned stores. Construction of the building posed a number of problems due to its size: firstly, the car park element of the centre had to traverse the railway tracks leading from the adjacent Glasgow Queen Street station, and the mall section itself had to be built over Cathedral Street. The mall houses eighty shops, and incorporates a ten-storey car park with two thousand spaces, twenty-two elevators, and nineteen escalators. The building has a design life of one hundred years.