Inside Stratford's mega mall

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10 April 2012

As I stand on the steps of the giant new Westfield shopping centre in Stratford and look across the huge construction site in front of me, I realise that the redevelopment of Stratford, taking shape in time for the Olympics (590 days away), is unprecedented. Nothing this size has ever been built so quickly in London's history. The Olympic Park, the Athletes Village and this giant shopping centre are part of a transformation of this area of east London that is monumental in scale and lightning fast in execution.

I've seen the drawings and computer-generated images of Westfield Stratford City many times, but now that the complex is just nine months from completion they do little to prepare you for the reality. This shopping centre is the largest inner-city mall in Europe, and has been created by Westfield, the Australian property developer behind scores of shopping centres in Australia and America. It even dwarfs Westfield London, the immense mall in Shepherd's Bush that is its western sister. As one of the first journalists to see inside the mega mall, I can report that the scale is truly mind-boggling, with 250 shops (still just shells at this stage) ranged in double-height arcades on three levels along with restaurants, offices, a cinema, a new Tube station ticket hall, car parking and possibly a casino, if the licence is granted.

Westfield Stratford City is, of course, just one of three adjoining huge building sites at Stratford, the two others being the Athletes Village and the Olympic Park itself. Looking out from the shopping centre towards the blocks of housing that will accommodate the 2012 athletes, I am reminded of pictures of building sites from the Sixties, or even from communist Russia — numerous huge blocks being built all at once with the help of a command economy.

And to think that this project would have been even bigger if not for the crash in the property market in 2008. Part of the Westfield masterplan is housing and offices that the market today will not support. These will be completed in future phases — podiums and foundations are in place, ready to receive them. After the Games, the area will be left with the 3,000 homes to the north of the Athletes Village, a shopping centre the size of the Westfield mall in Shepherd's Bush, plus one million square feet of offices and several hotels, as well as the Olympic Park, the stadium, the Aquatics Centre and the Velodrome. The developers have treated the entire area as a blank canvas, preserving not a trace of its former use.

The Westfield Stratford City shopping centre itself sits on former railway land, an island site divided from the rest of Stratford town centre by two railway lines and the already knotty Stratford one-way system. There are many new bridges (as many as 20) but the mall is still a place that is utterly distinct from what is around it, and there are certainly no sentimental references to its past life as a goods yard.
This is a brave new world, as envisioned by Westfield, an extraordinary experiment. But what of its architectural merit? Of course, the idiom of the whole of the shopping centre is the slick, seamless style that developers call "contemporary". There are flashy materials — bronzed cladding and patterned glass. There will be high quality materials underfoot (grey granite, as usual). Like most entirely new developments, there is a slightly unreal air about it. Westfield connects to the city around it but is nothing like it: there will be no mess, no informal development in this huge piece of city. This is a commercial development where the needs of retailers and their customers come first.

Westfield Stratford City is the second RPT major shopping development in London by the developer, and, together, the malls divide London in two. The strategic diagrams demonstrating Westfield Stratford City's viability include one that shows its catchment area of more than four million shoppers, stretching out into Essex and provocatively including the area around the Lakeside shopping centre in West Thurrock. In London itself, the catchment area stops at Holborn. If you have a W in your postcode you shop at Shepherd's Bush, if you have an E you are a target for Stratford.

The Stratford shopping centre is more mature than Shepherd's Bush. In west London, Westfield inherited a previous developer's plan, and continued with that scheme. The result is a single mall, with its by now well-known figure-of-eight plan. The Stratford centre is entirely Westfield's vision, and is more architecturally diverse, with a massive indoor mall, but with "anchor" tenants (Marks & Spencer and John Lewis) in distinct, separate buildings. The other critical difference is that Stratford has a mix of uses, and when complete will include hotels, offices and housing within the whole.

Westfield clearly has little time for architectural egos, and the practices it has employed to design the buildings were unlikely ever to rock the boat. It is a list of little-knowns: Crispin Wride for the John Lewis store, APA for Marks & Spencer, commercial architect HKR for a hotel. Bennetts Associates, designing another hotel, and Fletcher Priest, creating an office building, are better known.

There are not likely to be any architectural masterpieces here. Internally, the mall is spectacular, as these things go. The huge curving internal street, completely column free, is certainly impressive. But the John Lewis looks a slightly cheaper version of the department store's buildings in Southampton and Leicester. The Marks & Spencer is also a strange animal, with its white concrete with brass trim. There is little in the way of distinctive architectural character in any of the buildings I saw — although I should say that most were not yet complete.

But there are positives. The master plan has changed since its initial incarnation but retains an external route for visitors from Stratford centre to the Olympic Park. This route will pass under the projecting canopy of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre, and forms an axis that ends with the Olympic Stadium itself. Compare this with the life-sapping approach to Wembley Stadium and be impressed. There will also be spectacular views from the restaurants and bars at Westfield pacross the Olympic site for those who do not get tickets.

The shopping centre will be open in September next year, and then will begin the acid test for the borough of Newham and for east London. There will be somewhere around 9,000 jobs in the centre when it opens (and more to come as later phases are completed), but, beyond employment, the question mark for the legacy of this mega commercial development will be in its potential to lift Stratford town centre more generally.

We will be back to consider that in two years' time. Some pretty big reputations, not least Newham mayor Sir Robin Wales's, depend on this success. Stratford is a deserving east London centre with potential, but after some interesting work in the mid-Nineties (including the refurbished theatre and the Picturehouse cinema) the regeneration of the town centre has stalled.

Recent new housing on Stratford High Street is cynical and low quality.

The completion of Westfield could kick off a new wave of regeneration (which must start with the outdated, Land Securities-owned Stratford Shopping Centre). Alternatively, it could become the shiny, commercially successful big brother to an enduringly dowdy town centre.

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