It's Christmas, God bless a mall

[greatauntoftriplets]

Euan Ferguson braves Europe's largest shopping centre - and keeps his seasonal goodwill intact

Sunday December 19, 2004
The Observer

I'm sure I was just lucky. I'm sure, by today, the pink mackerel skies which hung over Kent yesterday will have turned to sleeting hell, as the pink mackerel ones often do. Inside the Bluewater Shopping Centre, 10,000 angry shoppers will be yelling profanities and bursting bunions, and road rage will have broken out in at least one of the multitude of car parks. But yesterday, by some miracle, I didn't quite go insane.

I was prepared for the worst. Bluewater, Europe's largest shopping centre, on the Saturday before Christmas. Kent. Near Dartford, in fact. No fewer than 320 stores, 40 cafes and after your day's shopping, if you unaccountably haven't decided to cut out your own lungs with a flensing knife, you can stay overnight at the Holiday Inn, Bexley.

It sounded unbearably grim, and my mood wasn't helped when some consumerist bat on the BBC News began banging on about the 'great leisure opportunity' afforded by such malls. They're not an anything opportunity, surely; they're just some shops under a big roof.

So I was hardly best disposed towards the place when I turned off the M25 to see its faux battlements and scary pointy turrets, like a particularly awful rendition of an alien city transplanted straight from a particularly bad 1968 Star Trek episode to the foot of a chalk quarry under the Dartford bridge.

http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/christmas2004/story/0,15611,1377011,00.html