"Renewed by everything, I thought I was a ghost."
John Ashbery
The television advertisement shows a flat blue screen so blank that it demands explanation. This blue is not of the sky, nor of the sea, nor of any flower. It may be that of a swimming pool on which a hot sun shines. There is a summery, Mediterranean aspect to this blue. But it does not seem like water. There is no movement, no reflection; only this steady blue. Perhaps there is an error in the transmission or in the set, and this blue is the default mode of the electronics. When all else fails we are taken to this blue. Its offer of coolness on a hot day invites us to stay calm while the fault is corrected. But, finally, a droplet falls and ripples spread. This is not mere blueness; it is, indeed, water. Blue water.
The architecture has a desert aspect. This could be an oasis, a settlement, an experimental station in the midst of climatic adversity. The buildings are hunched and turned in on themselves as if to resist heat. Beige chalk cliffs, dotted with tenuous, scrubby vegetation, overlook the site. Electricity pylons, feeding the place with power, mark the cliff edge where cars arrow along an important highway. A "dedicated" road swoops down to this settlement, to the huge, flat carparks where uniformed "hosts" direct you to your personal space. It is a bright day-brilliant sun, empty blue sky. If this were Nevada or Dubai, not Kent, it would be hot. Sweat would break out in the brief transit between one air-conditioning system and another. But it is early spring in England and it is cool. The place, like the blue screen, evokes an aspirational, an imagined, heat-the heat of a holiday.
The first thought is the usual one: I will never be able to find my car. To park is to abandon. I walk 20 yards and it is at once lost in a glinting puzzle picture of steel and glass curves. There are 13,000 parking spaces: the number fatigues and panics the imagination. It is a statement of an impossible gamble-13,000 to one. I search for a pen to write down some numbers on a blue sign, map references. There is also a symbol-a swan. I have no pen, but, as I approach the entrance, a young host gives me a blue card, a replica of the sign, which tells me where I have parked. Later, inside, I hear another young host giving a lecture on how to find your car.
Bluewater is, we are told, Europe's largest and most innovative retail and leisure destination. It cost ?360m and it will almost certainly be the last out-of-town shopping centre or mall to be built in Britain. The earth's environment pleads, wheezily, for the restriction of car use. The village, town and city centres are being drained of jobs, life and money by these rural settlements. Bluewater will probably destroy more jobs than it creates. We are building edge cities: safe, wealthy rings around poor, dangerous centres. The American experience provokes anxiety-by day downtown business, by night downtown mayhem. And so politics has turned against the mall.
But this is not as big a point as it seems. For Bluewater will not be the end of the mall way of life, only the end of the beginning. The mall works too well to be abandoned or abolished. Malls are safe. "There are no panhandlers," writes Paul Barker, "no alkies, no sad folk peeing in the street." And malls are true to what we have become, consumers demanding, above all, retail convenience. If it is our money you want, you must pay for it with pleasure.
The malls we have will thrive, and all else will aspire to the condition of the mall. Town centres are being pedestrianised and remodelled to mimic the mall dynamic of unencumbered, unthreatening public spaces and communality of retail purpose. The centres of Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester are malls. Oxford Street in London is owned more by pedestrians than by buses, cars or taxis, and its traders have discussed installing a mall-like roof along its entire length. Malls are still in demand, especially in the nouveau riche suburbs east of London. Only 15 minutes drive away from Bluewater, across the Thames in Essex, is the Lakeside mall, another huge regional shopping centre. The business of shopping has become too important to be interrupted by traffic or weather or to be conducted in the historically cluttered context of a real town. The mall is the full and final answer to the question: what do we do with our peace and our plenty? The mall is, therefore, good.
Pocketing my blue car locater, I enter Bluewater and descend a curved ramp. Entrance areas, the publicists say, are modelled on hotel lobbies, a clever boast-like the blue, it suggests holiday. There is even a concierge. And at once there is coffee. There is always coffee. Coffee is the sine qua non of the new retail experience. For the English the espresso machine has replaced the tea urn. In central London you are seldom more than 50 yards from a latte or a cappuccino. Muffins and cookies, the comfort snacks of alien nurseries, are always available to sweeten the bitter caffeine hit and spoil your lunch with their gastrically immobile softness.
There are 40 restaurants, caf?s and bars, and 320 shops in Bluewater. Eating and drinking are challenging shopping as the point of this place. One grandly impressive facade-the epic, curved frontage of John Lewis-celebrates this with huge windows at first floor level, exposing not the usual consumer goods but a long line of coffee drinkers on spindly chairs at designerish tables. Coffee Republic, meanwhile, is like a club class lounge, with pay phones provided on a big, two-tiered, circular table surrounded by purple armchairs. De:aLto is spare, groovy Italian, a budget River Caf?, and Hediard is full-blooded business lunch to be reclaimed from the company. Burger bars-the anchor eateries in downmarket malls like Lakeside-are cowed by this opulence. Both Burger King and McDonald's are barely noticeable, the latter even denied a place for its golden arches on the exterior elevations. They must be here-it is where they belong-but they know they are outclassed.
What can be said about the interior of this place? There is too much. It is a triangle with two straight sides and one curved side. The roof is an immense barrel-vault with curved leaves forming Soane-like domes, at the centre of which are lanterns admitting-a novelty, this-fresh air. The external intakes, which I had taken for sci-fi antennae or detectors, are modelled on the pinnacles of oast houses. All the internal forms are defined by curves and points which periodically resolve into outlined canoe shapes. The curve lulls; the point goads. On the upper level, etched glass canoes and discs set into the floor cause momentary vertigo. In the Wintergarden the building explodes into a giant glazed lobby-"inspired by Kew and... the largest greenhouse built in Britain this century"-whose vaulting design hubris tumbles into a quarter-curved wall of glass between three playful, asymmetric towers and then, as if that were not enough, expands into wooden New England decking, projecting canoe-shaped jetties into a lake with geese, bridges, boats, trees, sky, air and views of distant cliffs and pylons. Crowds are drinking coffee, eating muffins and smoking on the decking. At Bluewater there is always more. There is. Always.
The shops have taken the hint. "A staggering 200 of the 320 retailers are designing new concept and flagship stores for Bluewater." Only the dullest have resigned themselves to linearity or respect for the facade-line of the interior. Most employ projecting signs, curved intrusions into the walkways or recessed glazed entrances. They do not invite you to another interior, but rather embrace the space you are already in. There is, as physicists now know, no such thing as a vacuum. Emptiness is replete with fields of potential. What appears not to be a shop is, in fact, a virtual shop. Space seduces you with its fictional neutrality.
There is, indeed, too much. Deliberately so. Superfluity is the point. The place provides such a free excess that anything you decide to buy must feel like a bargain. And, of course, the sheer quantity of design is there to convince you that shopping is a positive activity. It is not a negative act of replenishment-filling the petrol tank, replacing worn-out shoes-but rather a positive act of improving a life. There are shops here-The Natural World, Earth and Space, The Discovery Store-which specialise in things you didn't know you ever could or would buy. Finally-not really, for there is always more to be said about superfluity-this excess is there to tell you that you are in a place. Like a town or village, there must appear to be much that is not shopping, otherwise the sense that shopping is all there is would become oppressive. Even though it is. And, again not finally, there is hanging-out. All malls like to encourage the loafer, the teen mall rat. It advertises their twin superfluities of space and time. Bluewater even makes a point of saying that its parking spaces are 25 per cent bigger than usual. An excess of space is benevolently bestowed and an excess of time is implied by the low soft sofas in spaces sufficiently neutral not to require the alibi of a coffee. This is a place to be; you do not have to do. Though, in the end, you will.
And the people. On a weekday there are a lot of men-the fruits of flexitime. The press release makes a point of saying that more than 90 of Bluewater's retailers have been chosen specifically for their appeal to male shoppers. Men now shop because everybody shops. Teenage girls road-test new boyfriends by taking them shopping. They must behave. It is the new qualification for intimacy.
Almost all the people here are dressed and groomed, some extravagantly, for the occasion. There are sharp, young, short-haired blondes with their crop-headed boys in Ralph Lauren shirts. Shrewish, pursed-lipped chicks in tight suits, their black hair dragged back tight, their skirts perilously hitched, pick at their dagger manicures over lattes in Coffee Republic. Bulky white boys in trousers with huge thigh pockets shamble by, their feet splayed and their crotches thrust in tribute to Liam Gallagher. Tall black kids in expensive sports gear wear beanies clamped to their shining shaved scalps. The old, meanwhile, look bewildered or smile as if in some vain attempt to patronise this splendour with their wisdom.
A fat, seventyish man in a flat cap gazes around like a tourist. He has badges on the lapel of his old jacket and his tie is worn over his pullover. So this-clean, new, peaceful, rich-is what it will be like when he is gone. His wife simply looks frightened and vaguely ashamed. The young are too agonised by the drama of their appearance and the old are too shocked to find themselves so out of place, so reminded of their mortality-they will be dead soon, why should they buy? Only the middle-aged look fully integrated and relaxed. Thirtyish couples show the place to their children, imagining their children's wonder to be as real as their own. Suburban fathers in cords, boat shoes and chunky knits gaze around with half smiles indicative of ironic acceptance. Chic, eternity-ringed matriarchs and podgy, track-suited mamas cruise confidently. A long time of plenty has taught them how to shop and, after a fashion, how to be themselves, even to the point of casting flirty glances at passing men.
Signs announce at the door that Bluewater is a no smoking environment. And so it is. Outside, fag butts, obediently stubbed before entry, protrude like little gravestones from trays of sand. Inside, the air is untouched by the grey dryness of tobacco fumes. Except that suddenly, I catch a rank whiff. A young, blonde, handicapped woman is rolling past me along Guild Hall in an electric shopping buggy, two fingers scissored on a Marlboro Light. Which brave host, I wondered, would dare challenge her?
But what's really big at Bluewater is The Word. As if unsure of the architecture's ability to speak its mind, the designers have literalised their effects. Over BB's Coffee and Muffin there is a huge panel with incised lettering-"I know no room more sacred than to find one's place in time." A florid quotation from Walter de la Mare arches over Marks & Spencer, and a pompous slice of mythology from Robert Graves welcomes you to House of Fraser. Thames Walk is decorated with lettering so big that you tire of trying to read the whole thing-although I do catch "Old Father Thames keeps rolling down to the mighty sea." A map of the river's course is embedded in the floor of this section, with dots and more lettering marking the towns along the way: Richmond, Twickenham, Sunbury. Wordsworth runs around one toilet block and Kipling around a courtyard. In Guild Hall, big sculptures are provided with explanatory captions-spectacle makers, cordwainers, skinners, dyers, tallow chandlers. And in Rose Gallery, lush, literary invocations of the flower run along the I-beams.
The age of the image, the post-literary age, has had to resort to the word after all, and the self-consciously literary word at that. "Conceived by American civic architect Eric Kuhne," runs the press release, "its distinctive modern style is heavily influenced by English culture, local folklore and the Kentish environment." One wonders about that "civic" but the "heavily" is exactly right. For nothing in Kuhne's imagery would, if uncaptioned and left to its own devices, speak of the English, the local and the Kentish-not even the huge symbolism of the shrines to water, earth and the heavens which mark the three corners of his triangle. He needs the words, incised, emblazoned and sculpted, to pin this place to its chalk quarry. Otherwise it would simply drift off into the globalised empyrean. The words make Bluewater feel heavier than it is, too heavy to fly away and leave us. The words are there in the hope that people will look up and say: "So that's where we are! This is not Florida or Nevada, it is Kent! And that river, it is the Thames!" That is why the letters in Thames Walk are so big; they are meant to look like part of the structure, part of the thing itself, so Bluewater could not be moved to Miami without becoming something else. But, of course, it could.
A postman with his Royal Mail trolley trundles past the shops-he is delivering letters. Somehow I had not thought that they needed postmen. Do they have milk floats? Why not?
The feet make no noise. People move soundlessly. Most have rubber soles but even the high-heeled chicks only click when they step on the etched-glass canoes or discs. This feels eerie. The floors, after all, are hard and stone-like. Is this some acoustic trick? Probably, for the effect is poetic. Like Prospero's isle, the mall is "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not." Overhearing becomes habitual. "Is anybody taking notes? Memory joggers?" A party of students or retail psychologists studying the place. "No, we're on the wrong level." A daughter to her elderly, baffled mother. "It's better than Lakeside." Overheard at least a dozen times.
This place and these people are nice. It is easy to be here, easier than in any real town. The hosts are well-trained and the staff in the shops emit an amiable, visionary gleam. At a hint of a personal response from a "guest"-Bluewater's word for its customers-they will tell you their lives and their dreams. One tells me he is saving up to buy one of the expensive weather-proof Berghaus jackets he sells. Another complains that a few stores "haven't really tried," meaning that they haven't caught the special Bluewater magic. Their faces shine, they flatter your whims and indecision, they tell you that it's all right to be you because they feel it's all right to be them.
I can easily imagine the newspaper columns I could write deriding this place. Bluewater drains the neighbouring towns. Its architecture, although fine and lovely, is depraved. The staff are robots. It pollutes. It glorifies the empty pleasures of consumption. Its superfluity is trivial. Its pompous words turn literature into decor. Its artificiality suppresses seriousness and depth. And the people? These are the last men, the men without chests, Nietzsche's nightmare. And so on and so on. But, in honesty, my response is not simple enough to make a column. This is a moment of transition and I know perfectly well that, before the change, these arguments are true and, after, they are false. At this point they are both.
They are true to the mind of a traditionally-educated man who was born into the old dispensation- the dispensation, he had been told, coextensive with a Greco-Christian-Renaissance-Enlightenment culture. From this instruction he derives an idea of the human which is necessarily at odds with that embodied in Bluewater. This, he sees, is a new way of life which supersedes the old. Knowing this, he seeks out the foundations of the values which sustain this new order. He finds none, and he writes his anxious columns.
But his arguments are false when seen from within the new order. Pollution? Our cars are cleaner than ever. Town centres? We will remake them as rival malls. Consumption? Absence of spiritual depth? Who is he to say? These people, in Bluewater at least, are happy, peaceful, mutually respectful and historically rich. If he doesn't want this, what does he want? If 2,500 years of intellectual and physical struggle were not meant to achieve this, what were they meant to achieve? What is his-okay, my-problem?
David Starkey has argued that the values of Judaeo-Christian civilisation were formed by scarcity. Plenty makes them redundant. Bluewater is plenty. Starkey delights in this. In response I can only mumble and ask: whence, if not from history, culture, art and religion, will come this new world's values?
Starkey knows also that this new world has no time for Enlightenment democracy. Across the developed world, electoral turnouts are falling. The vote presupposes an idea of man as rational, engaged, capable of an enlightened-if self-interested-objectivity. Where not already dead, that idea is dying. In its place is consumer choice. Our votes are becoming our buying and lifestyle decisions, monitored by credit cards and mobile phones which check in with their base stations whether we use them or not. CCTV cameras observe our movements in the name of security but also of market research. All the accumulated numbers and images are registered on connected computers. Focus groups and researchers with clipboards generalise our responses and pass the results on to corporations and political parties. The developed and consuming world now fights supposedly casualty-free wars-the raids on Serbia began while I was at Bluewater-so as to avoid adverse shifts in the polls. The old strategists might ask: what do the public know? The answer is that they know everything, everything there is to know. Reality has become our assembled and classified impulses. We can no longer sustain the democratic fiction of ourselves as wise, informed judges of the world and its ways. We are the world, we are its ways. History is now and Bluewater.
A new world has been born. But it was not built on the ruins of the old. Rather it simply adapted the forms and in doing so changed the meanings. Respect, in the old world, was an ethical absolute. At Bluewater it is part of a marketing mix. "Have a nice day" does not mean "I acknowledge the imperative of your personhood and, in doing so, assert my own"; it means "I encourage you to cooperate in this enterprise, as you now see me cooperating." Why should we not cooperate? What value or transmissible meaning persists in those old abstractions?
"Renewed by everything," writes John Ashbery, "I thought I was a ghost." I bought his latest collection of poems-Wakefulness-at Waterstone's in Bluewater. That line, read while sitting on one of those sofas in neutral space, inspired this article. I saw, as I read it, that I was indeed a ghost. My self had been made insubstantial by the constant renewals of consumption, of the shifting, chattering meanings and invocations of the mall. As Marx said, in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. On Prospero's isle, the actors are all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air. Wandering through the mall, we become ghosts, minimal selves on which the new world hangs its transitory meanings. We shall not inhabit the future; we shall haunt it. That is the price we must pay.
