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WHAT A TIME FOR A NEW MONSTER MALL

Unveiling a new shopping Mecca in the weeks before Christmas should have been a savvy move. But the timing now seems boldly inauspicious. And then there's the location.

Steptoe and Son’s famous junkyard was in the delicious but fictional Oil Drum Lane, Shepherd’s Bush. But who really lives in Shepherd’s Bush, London W12 now? Or White City? Or their hinterlands? The answers will define the fate of Europe’s largest urban—as opposed to suburban—shopping centre, the Westfield London, which opened recently in a strange no-man’s-land, a former exhibition site between Shepherd’s Bush and White City. It’s a monster, several streets long and wide, clad in slimy lavatorial green tiles.

The social ecology of the catchment is varied, with masses of inner-city ethnicities—highly evolved and unpredictable. It isn’t remotely like the catchment of the similar-sized Bluewater centre in suburban Kent, which is much more homogeneous, broadly white, middle and lower-middle suburban-aspirational. Hyper-rich Holland Park and hyper-smart Notting Hill lie to the east and Shepherd’s Bush media-land to the west, in those roads of half-gentrified artisanal semis off the Goldhawk Road.

Westfield, which is Australian-owned, sells itself as very aspirational. There’s an area they’ve been talking up—the Village—which is limited to luxury brands (just in time for the recession). They’ve made a lot of signing up Louis Vuitton, the world’s biggest luxury brand, suggesting that Westfield will be London’s third luxury centre after Bond Street and Sloane Street. Tiffany has signed up too, but it’s still not clear who all those other smart names will be. The signed-up tenants are all the shops you expect to see in any Clone High Street or mall in Anytown, UK: M&S, Debenhams, House of Fraser, Next.

The economy aside, might these cheerful Australians—with lots of experience of building giant US suburban malls—have got it subtly wrong about west London Brits? Part of the catchment is certainly super-rich—but snobby too and focused on Big Central London for its shopping, so perhaps not looking for a mall in a former wasteland. The rest of the catchment is decidedly difficult, with many people who are rightly fond of their local and ethnic shops. The huge contingent of BBC employees don’t strike me as natural shopping-mall types. In the end it may come down to the power of Vuitton and its hugely legible branding. 
~ PETER YORK

Picture credit: Jim Linwood (via Flickr)