Here's a view that may not be popular on these pages: Westfield
Stratford City shopping centre, the quite extraordinarily large,
1.9 million square feet, biggest urban shopping centre in Europe, which
opens this week on the edge of the Olympic site, is good for the part of
east London on which it has descended.
It creates 10,000 jobs, says Westfield. Most people in the area, asked if they would like to have this palace of retail, with its warm, dry, clean, grand, glass-vaulted spaces, and shops running from Primark to Prada, would say yes. It pays for things like bridges across the railway lines that divide one place from another. Unless you take the view that all malls are works of the devil, and should not be allowed anywhere, ever, it is better to have one here, where it can make some positive difference, than in a field on the edge of a motorway.
Stratford is a place
that has been love-bombed with transport infrastructure over the past 20
years and more, ever since Michael Heseltine ascended a tower block
there, was appalled by the view, and decided something must be done. As a
result, most punters will arrive by public transport. As the site was
formerly inaccessible railway land, there can be no concern here about
public space disappearing into the private maw.
The usual worry that malls destroy high streets does not seem to apply here. The pound shops and hardware stores of nearby neighbourhoods need not be unduly threatened. If anyone should worry, it is the out-of-town Bluewater centre in Kent, about 30 minutes' drive away, for whom few tears need be shed, or Lakeside in Essex or the shop owners of Oxford Street. It might actually be a blessing if the latter's congested pavements thinned out a bit and its buildings discovered other uses than shopping, as it might spare us the endless, and endlessly doomed, proposals to improve this unimprovable thoroughfare.
But, surely, Westfield's consumerist city on a hill, this great engine of aspiration and envy, set amid unredeemed tower blocks and shards of streets, is precisely the sort of thing that, post-riots, we should not be building. Is it not the theory that if material riches are placed in poor places, and access to these riches is then restricted, arson and glass-breaking follows? Well, maybe – but suppressing the rich side of the equation, rather than addressing the poor, doesn't seem to be the answer.
There is, however, something striking about Westfield Stratford City, which is that, for 70% of visitors to the 2012 Olympics, it will be the gateway to the Games, of which Westfield has just been announced as a sponsor. London's welcome to the world, and the introduction to the great international festival of athletic excellence and international brotherhood, will be a big M&S sign, and an avenue of shopping. The nation of shopkeepers will have earned a gold medal, before the Games even start, in the pastime it loves best.
The mall also sits on almost any route connecting the centre of Stratford, with its train stations, and the Olympic Park, and the housing, schools and businesses which it is hoped will emerge in the Games' wake. These routes are cranked rather than straight, so that your vistas are filled with retail offers. It is an urban version of a pop-up ad on the internet that demands "buy me, buy me" before you can get to wherever you are heading.
It was not originally supposed to be like this. Before London won the Olympics, and before Westfield acquired an interest, a masterplan was drawn up for the 180-acre Stratford City site, which followed the conventional wisdom that it is good to be a bit like Barcelona: a grid of well-defined streets formed by solid blocks, containing a mixture of homes, shops and offices. No one function, or business, should predominate.
This is not the way Westfield, the vastly successful shopping mall company that originated in Australia, operates, its model having developed in open suburban sites in its native land and in America. After London won the Olympics, it found itself, as Stratford City's director John Burton puts it, with "a synergistic win-win". The Games' organisers needed access to their park, and somewhere to put the athletes' village. The owners of the Stratford City site, which by then included Westfield, could offer both, while also seeing an opportunity to accelerate the building of the mall. The Olympics would pay for infrastructure that would benefit the private developers, and vice versa. It had been thought a 40-year project to complete all the phases of Stratford City, now it is 15.
In the negotiation that followed, Westfield had the better cards. It had the land that the Games needed, and the obligation to be ready by 2012 was not its problem. It is an aggressive company, whose co-founder Frank Lowy has been accused by a US congressional committee of tax evasion – an allegation he vigorously denies. At a more modest scale, I clearly ruffled feathers when I failed to be complimentary about its Westfield London centre in White City.
The principles of the Stratford City masterplan were shouldered out of the way. Its elements were disaggregated and rearranged as large lumps: the forbidding plattenbau that will be the athletes' village over there; the mall over here. There were some concessions, such as the decision not to put a roof over the route leading to the Olympic Park – getting wet having somehow become a sign of the civic – but Westfield site management, security and branding will be in force.
Westfield also agreed to environmental conditions which resulted in the centre achieving an "excellent" Breeam rating, which is the official standard of sustainability. It submitted to the scrutiny of a design review committee, which regularly checked its proposals, and under whose influence promising architects were selected to design individual elements. It commissioned public art. Unprompted, it came up with its own feelgood touches, such as getting Tracey Emin and Tom Dixon to find young artists and designers to carry out individual commissions.
The result is a mall of two halves, inside and outside. The inside part is formed around a crescent-shaped, triple-decker arcade, quite simple in its basic design, whose effect comes both from its scale and the energy and resources put into the individual shops. As the head of leasing explains: "You have a group of retailers unequalled in the UK, so people want to put on a pretty good show. It's like when women go to a ball – they want to look their best." There is an Apple Store kept gleaming by endless buffing and polishing. There are the smartest branches of Eat and Game that you have ever seen, and even the McDonald's looks classy.
In the outside part there is the avenue that leads to the Olympics, from Stratford station, via a big handsome bridge over the railway lines. At first it heads triumphally towards John Lewis, before branching left, with a whisper of regret, towards the aquatic centre, stadium and park. The buildings here include hotels as well as shops, and the architecture is variegated with what might be called developers' picturesque, the dissembling of the fact that this is a single work of a single company with random changes of cladding and form.
In the hands of an exceptional architect, it could have been better, but it could also be very much worse. It is not the horrible assembly of lazy kitsch that you get in the retail areas of the O2, for example. Of the two halves I prefer the inner one, as an honest and, frankly, impressive manifestation of the shopping machine that it is. The outdoor half, which tries to be a high-street-but-not-really, is disingenuous.
What remains is the insistence of the Westfield brand on the Games and legacy, and the impossibility of avoiding it. This might seem a trivial matter to visitors already softened up by similar drenchings of retail at airports or the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, but it is not. It asserts the primacy of a private enterprise in an area whose transformation has required many billions of public money, not only spent on the Olympics but also on the new Eurostar terminal at Stratford, and before that the extensions to the Jubilee line and the Docklands Light Railway. It removes the choice of experiencing the event and the place without being sold to. All that is required is a few straight streets leading somewhere other than shopping that are clearly identified as the property of the public.
Westfield argues that the would-be Barcelona of the original masterplan was never going to be viable, as having flats above shops is bad for business, and that the critical mass of its big mall was the only way to get anything done. This suggests that a new kind of planning is needed, one that can make sense of the city of lumps – mall, village, stadium, vanity sculpture for Boris Johnson and Lakshmi Mittal – that is the Olympic site. To insist on a 19th-century city of mixed-use blocks, only for it to be blown away by a contemporary development of single-use megastructures, does not work.
Rowan Moore,The Observer,
It creates 10,000 jobs, says Westfield. Most people in the area, asked if they would like to have this palace of retail, with its warm, dry, clean, grand, glass-vaulted spaces, and shops running from Primark to Prada, would say yes. It pays for things like bridges across the railway lines that divide one place from another. Unless you take the view that all malls are works of the devil, and should not be allowed anywhere, ever, it is better to have one here, where it can make some positive difference, than in a field on the edge of a motorway.
The usual worry that malls destroy high streets does not seem to apply here. The pound shops and hardware stores of nearby neighbourhoods need not be unduly threatened. If anyone should worry, it is the out-of-town Bluewater centre in Kent, about 30 minutes' drive away, for whom few tears need be shed, or Lakeside in Essex or the shop owners of Oxford Street. It might actually be a blessing if the latter's congested pavements thinned out a bit and its buildings discovered other uses than shopping, as it might spare us the endless, and endlessly doomed, proposals to improve this unimprovable thoroughfare.
But, surely, Westfield's consumerist city on a hill, this great engine of aspiration and envy, set amid unredeemed tower blocks and shards of streets, is precisely the sort of thing that, post-riots, we should not be building. Is it not the theory that if material riches are placed in poor places, and access to these riches is then restricted, arson and glass-breaking follows? Well, maybe – but suppressing the rich side of the equation, rather than addressing the poor, doesn't seem to be the answer.
There is, however, something striking about Westfield Stratford City, which is that, for 70% of visitors to the 2012 Olympics, it will be the gateway to the Games, of which Westfield has just been announced as a sponsor. London's welcome to the world, and the introduction to the great international festival of athletic excellence and international brotherhood, will be a big M&S sign, and an avenue of shopping. The nation of shopkeepers will have earned a gold medal, before the Games even start, in the pastime it loves best.
The mall also sits on almost any route connecting the centre of Stratford, with its train stations, and the Olympic Park, and the housing, schools and businesses which it is hoped will emerge in the Games' wake. These routes are cranked rather than straight, so that your vistas are filled with retail offers. It is an urban version of a pop-up ad on the internet that demands "buy me, buy me" before you can get to wherever you are heading.
It was not originally supposed to be like this. Before London won the Olympics, and before Westfield acquired an interest, a masterplan was drawn up for the 180-acre Stratford City site, which followed the conventional wisdom that it is good to be a bit like Barcelona: a grid of well-defined streets formed by solid blocks, containing a mixture of homes, shops and offices. No one function, or business, should predominate.
This is not the way Westfield, the vastly successful shopping mall company that originated in Australia, operates, its model having developed in open suburban sites in its native land and in America. After London won the Olympics, it found itself, as Stratford City's director John Burton puts it, with "a synergistic win-win". The Games' organisers needed access to their park, and somewhere to put the athletes' village. The owners of the Stratford City site, which by then included Westfield, could offer both, while also seeing an opportunity to accelerate the building of the mall. The Olympics would pay for infrastructure that would benefit the private developers, and vice versa. It had been thought a 40-year project to complete all the phases of Stratford City, now it is 15.
In the negotiation that followed, Westfield had the better cards. It had the land that the Games needed, and the obligation to be ready by 2012 was not its problem. It is an aggressive company, whose co-founder Frank Lowy has been accused by a US congressional committee of tax evasion – an allegation he vigorously denies. At a more modest scale, I clearly ruffled feathers when I failed to be complimentary about its Westfield London centre in White City.
The principles of the Stratford City masterplan were shouldered out of the way. Its elements were disaggregated and rearranged as large lumps: the forbidding plattenbau that will be the athletes' village over there; the mall over here. There were some concessions, such as the decision not to put a roof over the route leading to the Olympic Park – getting wet having somehow become a sign of the civic – but Westfield site management, security and branding will be in force.
Westfield also agreed to environmental conditions which resulted in the centre achieving an "excellent" Breeam rating, which is the official standard of sustainability. It submitted to the scrutiny of a design review committee, which regularly checked its proposals, and under whose influence promising architects were selected to design individual elements. It commissioned public art. Unprompted, it came up with its own feelgood touches, such as getting Tracey Emin and Tom Dixon to find young artists and designers to carry out individual commissions.
The result is a mall of two halves, inside and outside. The inside part is formed around a crescent-shaped, triple-decker arcade, quite simple in its basic design, whose effect comes both from its scale and the energy and resources put into the individual shops. As the head of leasing explains: "You have a group of retailers unequalled in the UK, so people want to put on a pretty good show. It's like when women go to a ball – they want to look their best." There is an Apple Store kept gleaming by endless buffing and polishing. There are the smartest branches of Eat and Game that you have ever seen, and even the McDonald's looks classy.
In the outside part there is the avenue that leads to the Olympics, from Stratford station, via a big handsome bridge over the railway lines. At first it heads triumphally towards John Lewis, before branching left, with a whisper of regret, towards the aquatic centre, stadium and park. The buildings here include hotels as well as shops, and the architecture is variegated with what might be called developers' picturesque, the dissembling of the fact that this is a single work of a single company with random changes of cladding and form.
In the hands of an exceptional architect, it could have been better, but it could also be very much worse. It is not the horrible assembly of lazy kitsch that you get in the retail areas of the O2, for example. Of the two halves I prefer the inner one, as an honest and, frankly, impressive manifestation of the shopping machine that it is. The outdoor half, which tries to be a high-street-but-not-really, is disingenuous.
What remains is the insistence of the Westfield brand on the Games and legacy, and the impossibility of avoiding it. This might seem a trivial matter to visitors already softened up by similar drenchings of retail at airports or the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, but it is not. It asserts the primacy of a private enterprise in an area whose transformation has required many billions of public money, not only spent on the Olympics but also on the new Eurostar terminal at Stratford, and before that the extensions to the Jubilee line and the Docklands Light Railway. It removes the choice of experiencing the event and the place without being sold to. All that is required is a few straight streets leading somewhere other than shopping that are clearly identified as the property of the public.
Westfield argues that the would-be Barcelona of the original masterplan was never going to be viable, as having flats above shops is bad for business, and that the critical mass of its big mall was the only way to get anything done. This suggests that a new kind of planning is needed, one that can make sense of the city of lumps – mall, village, stadium, vanity sculpture for Boris Johnson and Lakshmi Mittal – that is the Olympic site. To insist on a 19th-century city of mixed-use blocks, only for it to be blown away by a contemporary development of single-use megastructures, does not work.
Rowan Moore,The Observer,
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