Making impressions: experiencing Brent Cross Shopping Centre as a “non-place”

The events described below took place in January 2020.

    It didn’t feel like I was moving at all. I was on a bus, gently departing the greyed-out forecourt of Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Before I got on, I noticed that each individual standing in the bus shelter’s gift shared the same look of discontent. No matter how many shopping bags they were carrying, not one customer seemed pleased with their purchase. Maybe they got the wrong impression: mystified upon transition from the pacifying shopping parade into the no-man’s land beyond. Shock therapy: here is the hand that feeds the world of consumption. It didn’t feel like I was moving at all. It didn’t feel like they were moving at all. It didn’t feel like we were anywhere.

    I was new to Brent Cross. It was my first time in literal terms and my last time in aspirational ones. As a cyclist – one of Outer London’s dogmatic bugbears – I wasn’t welcome to cross the North Circular, or the A5, a former Watling Street stretching beyond the creeping hills of Cricklewood out to mysterious places with fantastical titles like The Hyde and Welsh Harp. These were just larger-than-life signs in the pedestrian-shunned deserts between Tube stops, enclaves only welcoming to foolhardy drivers and the buses that seemed to wander around these parts with their tails between their legs. It felt like the 102 to Edmonton Green was circuitous for the sake of its own sanity; to engage properly with the North Circular would be an admission of the ongoing primacy of the personal automobile and the resulting subordination of the omnibus. The only people who really needed bus travel here were vagrants, yummy mummies, teenagers, and one (1) cyclist with a folding bike plus a personal desire to be disconcerted.

    At street level the Shopping Centre had presented itself to pedestrians as a saving grace to the comparatively un-gracious planners in the northern half of Golders Green. Stretch your leg somewhere in the suburbs around the flyover and the only hint you’d get as a pedestrian would be which way to go for the Shopping Centre. It might have been easy, once, to trek from Hampstead to Hendon; it was where Brent Cross had fused its giant flyover into the landscape that things become confusing, underpasses masquerading as overpasses, motorway slips with egregious yet exclusive pavements, staircases to cubby holes under bridges that screeched and creaked like the American nightmare of highway hegemony from which post-war Britain had feigned escape. And this was exactly where the signs to Brent Cross Shopping Centre pointed; not to points of contextual suburban logic, the closest thing to a real, lived city around here, but to the hysteria of a built environment at cross purposes with everything. It was a Mexican standoff in the London Borough of Barnet. It was too complicated for cars; too daunting for pedestrians; too rigid for cyclists. The Knowledge must have collapsed at Brent Cross; there were no tell-tale signs to help a black cab remember this or that slip road – except, of course, the myriad unidirectional signs for “Shopping Centre”.

    Inside, an almost comic reversal. Pedestrianised space, but the worst kind; the sort thought up by planners thriving on futuristic “may live to see” advertisements and other portents for a world they hoped they’d die creating. Better than really living it, at least. Impersonating a version of himself, the American not-quite-novelist Ben Lerner commented that “nothing in the world … is as old as what was futuristic in the past”. More often than not, this ends in retrospective resentment: a sort of anger directed at impudent young entrepreneurs who thought themselves sociological soothsayers in the unknowable business of human progress. Like astrologists, they could take a good enough punt at how we might want to live, without wanting to turn our future-present expectations too rigid. In this respect, Brent Cross was an obsequious anticipation of a future human need that never materialised. Born on the 2nd of March 1976 (if a building is born when it opens, and not when it is imagined), Brent Cross is therefore a Pisces. As often as a horoscope can offer anything beyond a roundabout prescription on common characteristics, the Zodiac indicates that Pisces are... impressionable. Hard to place.

    Hard-to-place Brent Cross has totally unplaceable architecture and a vast stylistic dissonance from the suburb it surrounds. As one of Marc Augé’s exemplary “non-places”, it was a space of circulation, consumption and communication, flying above any sense of identification through white plaster and pacifying chart pop. With its dizzyingly uniform corridors and misdirecting mezzanines, Brent Cross was a herald of the ultimate astrological portent: it existed so that its placid guests could impart whatever image they wanted onto the space. Whichever consumerist daydream was on sale could be prioritised on a whim. Shopping (front-and-)centre. Both host and hosted became impressionable, but a hierarchy remained. The sheer impersonality of Brent Cross implied that consumers were its master; but nevertheless, it was the shopping centre that impelled them to consume beyond their base intentions. By allowing consumers to impress their own desires onto the Centre’s glazed, panoptical surfaces, they were cajoled to foresee dreams of consumption. That is not a mezzanine. It is an index. That is not a corridor. It is a conveyor. That is not a shop window. It is a mirror.

    The space was built to be constructed, in oxymoron that dissipates when the physical design of a space is distinguished from the space made up of signifiers our mind can dream up for it. This non-place, Augé’s “hypermarket”, was one of the older styles of control and consumption, enforcing top-down docility. Now we have more advanced methods. “Nothing in the world… is as old as what was futuristic in the past”. Brent Cross seems antiquated for its nods to old-style consumerist culture, surrounded by decentralised suburbs that fitted far more neatly into post-war village green optimism than modern inner-city pressurisation. Brent Cross showed its behaviourist hand, willing us to consume by allowing us to impress ourselves onto a blank slate. But this open Pisces palm meant that we were less likely to turn our heads when our worlds began to present inescapable consumption in subtler ways. The methods of the contemporary shopping website are an increasingly pressing example: the conveyors, indexes and mirrors are no longer “built” physically, but they can still make impressions. A “non-place” no longer needs to be a centre. It can be everywhere.