The Shopping Mall

Abstract

This chapter tackles the history of the shopping mall in Britain. It argues that unlike shopping malls in the United States or nations that were urbanizing for the first time, shopping malls in Britain emerged in tense negotiation with a state-directed and developmental retail infrastructure established a generation earlier. The chapter discusses the distinction between two types of space: the shopping mall and shopping precinct in order to show how a qualitatively new urban form arose in Britain in the last third of the twentieth-century. It presents the history of the shopping mall which allows us to see how during this period a new relationship between the consumer, state, and economy emerged in Britain. The chapter explores the shopping mall's distinctive contribution to late-twentieth-century British life by historicizing three of its most important features. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates how the shopping mall in Britain emerged from the ashes of a developmental compact between urban planning and the management of consumer demand. It investigates how shopping mall developers in Britain replicated a globally standardized type of urban space, aligning parts of Britain's built environment with that of the United States and world.