Why enjoy the sunshine when you could torment yourself in a shopping centre?
I t was the first beautiful day of 2023 and everyone in the country was in a park, except for me. I was in Westfield’s west London outpost, in Shepherd’s Bush. I’m not allowed to write about the kids any more – I’ve had article eight of the Human Rights Act thrown at me – so let’s just say that two children belonging to someone else made me do it.
I hadn’t set foot in the place since 30 October 2008, when I covered its opening, which was newsworthy because it was the largest covered shopping centre in the UK. Boris Johnson had recently been elected as mayor of London; the country was yet to clock how tragic the consequences of that would be. He was at the opening, but I missed him because I ran into my school friend’s mum.
Everything has changed, everything has remained the same. Well, there are a load of Korean wares now – bubble tea, makeup – which is why this stranger’s children forced me there in the first place, but the M&S is still standing. John Lewis is there now, but these days is happy to be knowingly undersold, having dropped its 97-year-old slogan last year, although you wouldn’t notice to look around. You would just think: “Is the market for slacks and Le Creuset pepper grinders still that hot?”
Oh, there has been one other change, just a small thing, really: all our underpinning assumptions about capitalism. We don’t even call it that any more, we call it “late capitalism”, a phrase I used to like, because it made it sound like it was nearly over, but now hate, because it makes it sound exploitative and discourteous.
When this place opened, it had a strong tang of metaphor: it was so shiny yet so windowless, so vast yet so repetitive, that you felt blessed to be allowed in and also completely disoriented,
Read more on theguardian.com
