Pigeons in Arndale Centres
The food of Britain's shopping centres. Words and photos by Owen Hatherley.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, Owen Hatherley writes about the malls developed by Arndale in the 1960s and 1970s, which, when they began to fail as commercial propositions for landlords, became some of the most interesting places to eat lunch in the UK.
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Two things to check out this week: Daniel Hong spoke to Evan Kleiman on the Good Food podcast about his Vittles piece on Gastrodiplomacy. Listen or read the transcription here. The spring/summer issue of Crafts magazine has a special themed section on the relationship between craft and food. Get the magazine here.
In the last two weeks, we published Give us this Day: a Vittles Bread project, which consists of feature pieces, and several guides. You can read the project here.
Pigeons in Arndale Centres
The food of Britain’s shopping centres. Words and photos by Owen Hatherley.
In 1976, the great South London critic and novelist Angela Carter wrote a love letter to Doncaster Market. In it, she contrasted the strange pile-up of meat, livestock and bric-a-brac housed in the Victorian covered market hall with the town’s recently constructed ‘Arndale Centre’, which had opened in 1968 but was already becoming derelict. The strikingly modern concrete retail universe, which was set over several floors, with walkways suspended over promenades of shops, was a ‘total merchandising environment with artificially modulated lighting and controlled temperatures’: that is, a mall. For Carter – writing in the mid-1970s, when a skint Britain was begging for the IMF – the Arndale Centre, with its vain hope of creating American-style consumers, had acquired ‘some of the quaint appeal of the ruins of those giant churches built in Paraguay by the Jesuits in the fallacious hope of the conversion of the Amerindians.’ She went on to note that ‘This one has a piazza with a concrete pool in it, dry now.’ However, despite Carter’s perception of their stark differences, the line between the bustling hodgepodge of Doncaster Market and the chilly mall-scape of the Arndale Centre is not as distinct as it might seem. You don’t need Victorian buildings to create some of the density and unpredictability of the historic city.
Whereas US malls have their roots in suburbanisation, Arndale centres and the malls like them in Britain were built as part of the ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ of city and town centres during the 1960s and early 1970s. This process, as described in Otto Saumarez Smith’s recent history Boom Cities, essentially meant package deals between councils and developers, where a chunk of unloved Victorian city was sold to an investor, who agreed to build a (profitable) shopping mall and speculative offices in exchange for (not-profitable) council housing built (sometimes literally!) on top, sometimes with a library or leisure centre inside. The major developer of the structures that resulted was a company called Arndale, founded in 1950 by West Yorkshire entrepreneurs Arnold Hagenbach and Sam Chippendale: hence ARN-DALE. Although only a couple of malls still bear that company’s name (and this doesn’t include the one in Doncaster), Arndales can still be easily recognised. The Arndale aspiration to contain an entire high street, in all its complexity, within a single megastructure means that they can – sometimes – contain more lively and unusual places to eat than the food courts of suburban malls. The best Arndales are the ones where, as the neighbourhoods in which they are situated have changed, so too have they, taking on distinct identities linked with their location and the communities that live there. Whereas Westfield malls have the same food everywhere, you will not find the same food in an Arndale in Luton as you will in Bradford. Â
One such example, also in Carter’s essay, was Castle Market in Sheffield, which although ‘housed in multi-storeyed, concrete erections scarcely distinguishable from any Arndale Centre in the world’, was as weird and interesting as any market built in the nineteenth century. ‘You can’t buy live pigeons in any Arndale Centre that I know of’, Carter continued – but, in fact, you could in Castle Market. The demolition of Castle Market was, along with the Elephant and Castle shopping centre in London and the Birmingham Central Library, the greatest architectural loss of twenty-first century Britain. It looked, as Carter wrote, like a slightly worn 1960s shopping centre, but when you got up onto its walkways, everything you could want in a city was inside – from a shop selling old postcards and photos, and a basement floor of butchers and fishmongers, to cafes made purely of vitrolite and Formica. I visited Sheffield often in the 2010s, and I would always make my first port of call on arrival the Roof Top Cafe in the market, a striking modernist space on a walkway in the sky that would firmly root you to the ground with liver, gravy and potatoes. Castle Market was planned from the start as a project plugging a weird Victorian city centre into a concrete megastructure – it was never really a mall, though it may have looked like one. Its replacement, a hangar half a mile away, is pleasant enough, but while outside it looks like a traditional nineteenth-century covered market, inside it feels like a slightly cheap, lower-rent 1980s-style out-of-town mall (one-note, predictable).
In so many cases, British malls – particularly the out-of-town behemoths and the newer, higher-rent Westfields - do not really function as normal parts of the city. They tend to be dominated by the dullest chain stores and the most predictable food courts, and patrolled by the heaviest private security. The moment a mall comes alive often arrives, ironically, when it is deemed a commercial failure: when landlords can’t command premium rent, they are then often happy to let the space go fallow until the property developers move in. When capital (and with it the tight ‘curation’, to which businesses have access) retreats, then people who live locally can participate in determining the use of a mall. The most interesting British malls, like those in Luton, Wood Green or Bradford, are actually inner-city or inner-suburban – because these places are comparatively low-rent, because they often cater for a more working-class and multicultural clientele, and because the city around is able to seep into them and claim them as their own. They’ll contain Indian or Turkish street food stalls next to greasy spoon caffs, and reflect what is happening around them rather than a narrow selection of venture-capital-backed food start-ups and chains. If an area has a significant African community, for example, you might find a canteen that serves suya in the mall (in a basement or an upper storey, away from the Robert Dyas and the TKMaxx).
As at Castle Market, much of the ability of Arndales – and Arndale-like malls – to change over time, and along with the communities they serve, comes from the fact they initially had indoor markets planned within them. This came as part of the process of getting planning permission, a product of Arndale’s faintly corrupt quid pro quo with local authorities. Markets, because they’re lower-rent, more subject to change, and smaller in scale, have an almost unique effect in helping a failed mall become interesting. The sort of bustling juxtapositions that Angela Carter witnessed in Doncaster’s Victorian market can be found in the Kirkgate Centre in Bradford, a former Arndale Centre currently slated for demolition. Designed in 1976 by John Brunton and Partners (who were also the architects of High Point, the city’s formidable and just-listed Brutalist tower), the Kirkgate Centre is a chunky concrete megastructure which is perhaps hard to like (I like it, but there are buildings I find easier to defend on aesthetic grounds than others). Its upper levels are pretty normal, somewhat down-at-heel chains, but signs point you to where the action actually is: the market, which has an entire floor to itself. Although the building is obviously being cleared and run down to prepare it for demolition at the time of writing, you still get the sense of this.
Here, you are still in the actually-existing and really very interesting Bradford of the twenty-first century, where carpets and saris and jewellery and crime novels and children’s colouring books and nail-painting and eyebrow-threading services and all sorts of peculiar things are sold under a futuristic concrete waffle-pattern ceiling. The walls are decorated with a concrete mural by the sculptor William Mitchell, alternately abstract and cutely representational. The stalls are flanked by a row of small cafes, each of them designed (as at the Elephant) like a little modernist steel-and-glass unit in its own right, and selling various kinds of caff fare. As at Castle Market, I have a favourite, and it is the formidable Baxendalls Cafe, a Formica wonderland which serves superb steak-and-kidney pies with gravy, mushy peas, and good, thick chips. It is still serving, and is firmly recommended.
Luton’s Arndale Centre also has a basement market level, but unlike in Bradford, some of its appeal comes from an under-served upper level. These are usually the places in malls where the interesting stuff happens; they have lower rent, a reflection that people are less inclined to bother with the trouble of escalators (I suspect the reason, for instance, that the very Brutalist Lewisham Centre is not as exciting as it looks from the outside is the fact that its units are too easy to let, and it has neither basement nor upper-level). Fans of the film Blinded by the Light will be familiar, whether they know it or not, with Luton Arndale Centre’s Greenfields, a 1970s cafe-restaurant in a kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style that combines Swiss chalet, art deco ice-cream parlour, and working men’s club. Greenfields’ stained-glass sign leads to an interior which would surely be listed were it not in Luton; the menu includes ‘Chicken Oscar’ and ‘Choppy Grill’, both of them vaguely Italianate versions of seventies English fare, and the last time I checked, it also served wine. If part of the appeal of Greenfields is the time-warp it offers into 1972, the market also has within it a roti and a Korean stall, along with Delicious Jamaican Food Center and Indian Lunch; they’re slightly less luxurious than the restaurant in the upper level, but equally popular.   Â
Two malls have failed particularly interestingly, and they are both Arndale-style megastructures which originally boasted the unusual name of ‘Shopping City’ – an indication, perhaps, of their urban intentions. The first of these is Salford Shopping City, built in the middle of the 1960s – close to what is now the University of Salford. Taken on its own merits, Salford Shopping City is a diagrammatic megastructure which you can read instantly as you walk through the underpasses leading to it from the surrounding estates: a long, sculptured concrete row of shops, interior and exterior; a tower of council housing on top, with a sign whose arrow points down to the shops; a flyover leading across the shops and the service roads into the car park. It’s as if someone tried to re-shoot Metropolis with the budget of a village fete. Inside are mostly charity shops (some of us would rather go to a good charity shop than to The Kooples, but there really are a lot of them here), and their main clientele – the elderly and students. There are a few cafes, but what is perhaps more interesting is the attempt to revive the market of the Shopping City. At one point, new stalls led locals to fear that, like in the Manchester Arndale, it would soon be full of places where you pay £7 for a bubble tea.
It isn’t. In fact, the stalls I visited were actually exactly the sort of places you would have found in Castle Market or the Kirkgate Centre in their heyday. I tried two of the competing food options in order to decide whether or not this place was genuinely in danger of becoming Mercato Metropolitano, and I don’t think it is: Vera’s East African Café provided a bag of superb, crispy, meaty, fragrant samosas, while Farmhouse Deli served me a pork pie with a layer of fat on top of the pork. I still had change from a fiver.
While Salford Shopping City is an artefact of the sort of spaced-out, car-centred sixties urbanism that took the form of single-family subdivisions in the US and council blocks in vague non-space in the UK, Wood Green Shopping City combined an almost deranged level of planning ambition with a much more pragmatic and urban approach to building a shopping centre. Built atop a derelict railway station between 1976 and 1981 to designs by Sheppard Robson (the architects of Churchill College in Cambridge), it is slammed right into the city, with no motorways or surface car parks – instead, concrete walkways meet Victorian terraces, and a ‘Sky City’ of brick flats on top of the shops looks out over very ordinary inner-London suburbia. This is surely the secret of its success because, in architectural terms, it is not messing about – it is a constantly writhing and transforming mass that runs across both sides of the street, along several city blocks, up and down multiple levels, all executed in the same machine-made bright-red brick. And with the Elephant and Castle gone (and the similarly-unusually-interesting Stratford Centre slated for demolition), Wood Green Shopping City is the last man standing.
Like in the north, there is a market in Wood Green Shopping City, and as at the Kirkgate Centre, it is a bit extraordinary. It is best reached via the slightly sad, mostly disused shopping arcade that flanks the miniature ziggurat of Wood Green Library, so that you’re taken into some quite strange spaces before you even arrive at ‘Arabian Desire’ and ‘Glamorous by Ella’. Standing underneath the market’s concrete waffle ceilings, my first thought was of Chungking Mansions, the notoriously complex market, factory and housing complex in Kowloon, Hong Kong that Wong Kar-Wai filmed in Fallen Angels and Chungking Express. Bright, bulbous 1970s signs that will one day end up in the V&A flank the pathways; there is a falafel stall, a Mauritian restaurant, an East Asian supermarket, a Turkish place selling frozen manti to take away, and a ‘continental’ supermarket which still has the flag of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over its entrance.
Wood Green Shopping City also has a food court, and this in itself is not unusual – every boring mall has its upper-level place at the top of the escalators with a Wagamama and a Wahaca. However, the Wood Green version includes, behind its own shiny black door, JRC Global Buffet, a small chain offering a ‘global dining experience’ of all-you-can-eat paella, teppanyaki, pizza and roast dinner, among other things; presumably you can pile these on top of each other to fully re-enact La Grande Bouffe (other branches are in Croydon and Wembley, among others). Sadly, it was closed when I visited.
The reason Wood Green Shopping City has held out is perhaps due to some combination of its sheer structural cussedness – demolishing something so closely integrated into the townscape would be extremely difficult and expensive – and for the fact it clearly manages to be both one single complex and a series of quite distinct, often quite odd spaces. It feels like a real piece of city, but of course it isn’t. It is owned, like scores of malls across the country (including the Luton Arndale) by a company imaginatively named ‘The Mall’. It is part of Capital & Regional, a vast management and investment trust. This centralisation of ownership means that if it becomes more profitable to put Joe & the Juice in the space that once housed Greenfields or Indian Lunch, then that’s what will happen. Because of the changeover in units and the intensifying effects of the market, an Arndale-type mall will often take on the qualities of real parts of the city – but you can’t walk through it at night, you can’t protest, you can’t picket, you can’t do things The Mall wouldn’t want you to do. Take the markets out, as is the case with dozens of lesser malls across the country, and these places become almost entirely homogenous, serving the highest bidders – which, in terms of food, tends to be the venture-capital-funded chains that fill most of Britain’s food courts and high streets.
The point here is political as much as a consequence of planning and accident. Like some of the New Town centres – Cumbernauld, or Milton Keynes – Wood Green Shopping City is so complex and so crucial to the area that it is really performing a variety of public services, and should be assessed accordingly. As Sam Wetherell notes in Foundations (his history of the recent past in the built environment), post-war Britain’s hybrid urban mall-centres were usually intended to be open all day and all night, as if they were a series of open-air streets. Like a street, they were supposed to have places to eat that had qualities you could only find in one specific place, according to the demographics and tastes of the area, or the interests, caprices or obsessions of the cafe or restaurant’s owners and chefs. This, like much else, was abandoned when these places were sold off to the same pension funds and transnational investors as any other mall. But what Wood Green Shopping City proves is that a shopping centre can be a city, if it’s planned well enough and designed with the sufficient lack of compromise. Given that they are really performing a public service, these malls – and those like them – should be treated like any other public service. That is, they should be nationalised.Â
Credits
Owen Hatherley is a writer. His most recent books are Transitional Objects, a photobook about Poland, and Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects, about housing and planning in New York City.
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A seemingly dry subject brought to life and tempted a visit - Wood Green my closest - to appreciate. Thank you; a lot of work went into that.
Excellent read. Living in Luton as a postgrad the Arndale, and the market where you could buy *everything* were Saturday staples.