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| Link to The Observer |
"The massive new Westfield Stratford City mall – with its 300 shops, 70 restaurants and bars, a 17-screen cinema and 1.9m sq feet of retail space – opens on Tuesday in Stratford at the site of next year's Olympic Games, at a time when one in seven shops in Britain are boarded up as retailers struggle.
"Richard Dodd of the British Retail Consortium said:
"Any retailer or developer would want to be able to choose a time to open, and we wouldn't choose the conditions we have now. But that doesn't mean that if they knew in the past what it would be like now they would have cancelled."
Link to
"M&S plans Olympian store in east London" (from 2008).
David Mitchell: "Is your high street boarded up? Blame yourself for shopping online"
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| Link to Observer |
"Is there no solution to the menace of internet shopping and out-of-town malls?
"I went to Westfield in Shepherd's Bush recently. It was a disconcerting experience because it wasn't nearly as unpleasant as I'd hoped. It's quite light and airy, very convenient and usable. It has the slightly unreal quality of a peace-loving planet from a Star Trek movie. I hated that I didn't hate it. Even as a non-driver, I could see no obvious reason to shop in Oxford Street instead (let alone the Kilburn High Road).
"That's what's so frightening. I don't think many of us want to live in a country where the retail hearts of our inner cities wither and die, where those without cars have access only to Londis and Ladbrokes and where urban living is reduced to a sanitised suburb, an air-conditioned complex of chain stores and a ring-road in between – a sort of narrow gauge version of the midwest."
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