When you were small, did you ever get assigned to write a story about being trapped in a shopping centre overnight? After you finished the one about being shrunk to the size of a fingernail, or washed up on a desert island, it was all set to be your runaway bestseller.
In spidery Berol letters you set forth the horror of the urban shopping centre by sundown. ‘Nightmares In The Shopping Centre!!’ was the proposed title, and it was sure to reel in all the “Good Try” stickers from your teacher’s desk.
Back then, maybe, the English shopping centre was the stuff of nightmares. Good honest nightmares that didn’t pretend to be anything else. A windowless, airless hall of mirrored escalators, where fried food outlets encircled shoppers like vultures, discoloured tiles stuck fast to the surfaces on which they had long been laid, and an overhead hanging bulb or two tarred the whole scene with a nasty yellow light.
In some cases, high street outlets would be interspersed with market stalls, and the smell of worn-out fish and animal flanks hovered over imitation clothes, cotton reels and discount bottles of nail varnish. There was never much impression of unity in these establishments. Get in, get your wares and get out. Nobody went there expecting a day at the races.
But gradually, as developers became aware of the untapped moneymaking potential of these zones, they set to work devising ways to get people to spend more time in them. The shopping experience was cranked up a gear and emerged as a legitimate pastime in itself. Gone were the tatty stalls: in swept the slick urban walkways, whose streamlined anatomy eliminated any chance of disorder or milling about.
It was this sanitised, wipe-clean environment which became increasingly embraced by the modern shopper. You know, The Modern Shopper. That well-heeled specimen which voluntarily spends its time flitting from one branch of TopShop to another. Maybe you’re one of them. How many times did you nod on hearing a friend sneer that Sheffield “has no shops?” How many times did you skim across to Meadowhall and pluck out your soul at the entrance, just because you wanted to find a pair of decent shoes in your size?
Like the High Wycombe shoppers who mistook John Lewis for a B&B earlier this year, you may be at risk of grinning in a dystopian inferno. The film Logan’s Run, which came out in 1976, showcases a whole community of people in your situation. Watch it, and wonder just when a vision once so gloriously alien began to accurately reflect your surroundings.
Silver domes resembling bargain basement kettles. Conveyor belts. Disembodied voices over a speaker system. Bizarre light fittings. Hordes of youthful creatures sealed in a pleasure-seeking void.
No matter how Far Out such ideas might have seemed at the time of the film’s release, we are now well acquainted with the kind of structures that are designed to intrude upon the natural landscape, and all that lurks within them. They are not buildings you can casually sidle along into. They tend to be located in retail parks removed from the city itself, like a limb discarded to one side. If that limb sprouted arteries linking it neatly onto Junction 34 of the M1. Yet there you find yourself, week after sorry week.
Unfortunately for this sermon, the similarity between retail zones and dystopian fantasies has become such a commonplace observation that it is hard to know where to run with it. Most people will have noticed at some point the giant plasma screens projecting endless superfluous footage across every city, and if George Orwell had a disused factory for every time someone muttered “It’s like 1984”, he’d be a little long in the tooth.
No, it doesn’t take a socialist visionary to recognise the parallels. Everyone is well aware that we finally caught up with the future, and for the most part cloned shopping centres have gone down a treat.
So: cleaner surfaces, wider selection, fewer meaty odours to contend with. What is there, exactly, to gripe over? Only that the modern shopping centre is no longer a place that lends itself well to primary school writing classes. Unless you’re turning out a sci-fi potboiler, of course. Then you’re in clover. Aside from a few test tubes and an apron-clad robot, everything’s waiting for you.
What is disconcerting, brethren, is the manner in which we are led to believe that these structures operate exclusively at our convenience. Later closing hours endow shoppers with the dubious privilege of peering through clothes rails until past dinnertime, and those people behind you have wallets clasped to their chests as tight as bibles. When the truth is, you’re having your own hard-earned leisure hours ripped out of you for the sake of buying yet another nautical-striped top. The shabby old marketplaces never detained you like this.
If you hesitate for a moment, and drown out the choruses of “Found a really nice dress really nice dress really nice dress” from the surrounding din, you can almost sense that omnipotent presence in a board meeting in a shirt and tie, smacking its lips as decisions are implemented over your very head. Someone has taken pains to ensure that we all slot neatly into this environment, and there’s more than a lick of divinity about it.
Isn’t there? Like churches, retail zones are characterised by their endless promises, with billboards doing the hard sell on an afterlife you can buy into. Why is it that every forthcoming space must be advertised with pictures of a couple baring their teeth as they clink glasses of champagne? Or a young blonde woman tossing her head back with alleged mirth as a diamond glints from her neck?
Because such images give us something to aspire to, of course, and hopefully, if we’re lucky, they’ll start putting into practice the Logan’s Run policy of blowing people up when they hit thirty, so we don’t have to experience a world outside of the urban dream. And the security guards will no doubt take to shooting would-be escapees and reducing them to slug trails across the linoleum floor.
*All stills adapted from one the best films ever made: Logan’s Run.