Mall-Content (mal-content): Noun - Behind the Scenes at Britain's Shopping Malls

Finally

PROLOGUE

I hope you enjoy this book.

It's intended to reflect my fond memories of working in and visiting places which so well reflect our love affair with shopping, and the consequences of that for those who work in and shop at some of the largest retail destinations in the land.

A social historian recently described shopping centres as the 'cathedrals of the 21st century'. Insofar as they represent the main leisure pursuit in Britain today he's probably right. But I'd be surprised if people behaved quite that strangely in church.

For more than a decade I worked in marketing teams across the shopping centre industry, most recently at Riverside, one of Britain's biggest and best-known shopping centres based in Mandon, a prosperous city and industrial powerhouse which had successfully reinvented itself after the closure in the 1970s of much of its local heavy industry . Each year its 10,000 staff would welcome the 20 million people who flocked through Riverside's doors, eager to sample its tempting mix of hundreds of delicious shops.

Or just to be weird. This is their story.

I was a child of the 1970s. I can remember doing my primary school homework to candlelight during the power cuts and three-day week of one of the most strike-ridden decades in history. Shopping then was a chore not a leisure activity, and that was reflected in the make-up of the High Streets, which were full of independent stores which hadn't changed a thing about how they did business in decades. These generally small shops opened from 9am 'til 5pm weekdays except on Wednesdays (market day) when they closed at 1pm. They also opened a half day on Saturdays but certainly not on a Sunday.

It was a time of social upheaval but yet it was also somehow a time of greater certainty and comfort than in the modern age of unconstrained speed, internet and disposable consumerism.

Despite glam rock, Chopper bikes and Zoom ice lollies the most vivid colour for the first half of the 1970s to my mind was grey. For the first half of the decade even the weather seemed greyer than usual and I remember my parents – who owned a small shop in one of Mandon's commuter suburbs - struggling to make a living as Britain's economic performance spiralled ever downwards.

This sense of greyness was perfectly echoed when, at the very end of the decade, a brutalist modernist box was about to open its doors and thereby forever change the way Mandon shopped.

Riverside was one of Britain's earlier shopping malls, coming a few years after trail-blazers like London's Elephant & Castle Centre, Brent Cross Shopping Centre and Milton Keynes' centre:MK. It landed like a cuckoo in the nest of suburban comfort that is Mandon.

Its name was a source of some mystery. It had been built at a crossroads on the site of a long-abandoned community centre and playing fields which hadn't seen a game of football in 30 years. But the idea of a river was wishful thinking as the only pools of water nearby were in long abandoned slag heaps.

Whilst 'Slagside' understandably wouldn't have made the cut, its current name hardly reflected its location.

In any case, it was never meant to survive. It, alongside all the other 'first and second generation' malls, had been quickly written off by the Mary Portas-style retail seers of the time as a 'white elephant'.

Too big, too brash for Britain's more cultivated tastes these malls were adjudged to be American-style imposters which would soon go bust.

There was only one problem: they were completely wrong.

Riverside's air-conditioned behemoth introduced wide-eyed shoppers in the North to novelties such as late night opening every weekday. And with so many shops under one weatherproof, climate-controlled roof and loads of parking for just £1 for four hours the local High Streets suddenly seemed a crowded, expensive, inconvenient alternative.

The age of the shopping centre had begun.

As a teenager growing up in the leafy villages to the north of Mandon it was only natural for me to be tempted by the metaphorical cool of Riverside. In those days the cooling air of the malls mixed with the heady scent of freshly lacquered wooden balustrades and newly-laid matching wooden floors, now replaced by harder-wearing (but just as noisy) marble.

People shopped in their droves, particularly flocking to the centre's three new department stores which offered the frisson of shopping at a much larger city but without having to travel many miles to do so.

The main entrances to Riverside connected up local trams, buses and trains and so were popular with teenagers like me yet to pass their driving test.

In those days each entrance was patrolled by security guards in smart green uniforms with matching peaked caps. They looked like a cross between a parking warden and a gardener.

These early malls introduced the concept of café dining to retail and at Riverside there were popular restaurants clustered together at either end of the mall.Being a teenager it was only natural to see just how patient the mall's security guards could be. I soon found out.

A friend and I had brought with us to the mall two kiddie plastic guns which fired little plastic balls and we were getting in some target practice. This involved leaning over the balcony from above and aiming for the cups of tea and coffee being drunk by unsuspecting diners in Nani's, one of the two eateries below.

We were getting quite proficient.

And so it was that my first visit to Riverside ended up with me being unceremoniously kicked out by security. At the time, the irony was lost on me.

In more than twenty years not much had changed on the outside of Riverside. Its concrete and brickwork was now a little duller and the exterior showed streaks of pollution from the nearby main roads but it still sat and glowered over the surrounding neighbourhoods as if daring people to shop there.

Over the years it had forced its way into people's regular routines and had seen a generation of shoppers through the circle of life's engagements, weddings, births, deaths and divorces. And now the children of the original shoppers were making it their home.

I had responded to an ad in a trade magazine and had applied to run the marketing team at Riverside . I thought the job would be taxing yet amusing, having grown up in the area and still being a regular if reluctant shopper there.

I was particularly interested by the need to help reinvigorate some of its retail line-up, old brands which no longer had a place in a mall which had steadily moved upmarket as the areas it served had prospered and became even wealthier. And the fact it was less than half an hour by car from my home in the county next door was an added bonus after I had commuted an hour and a half each way into the local city for the last fifteen years.

The interview process had been rigorous. The last interview had taken place in London, in the Boardroom of the large listed company which owned Riverside. It had taken me two hours to travel south by train and I had been interviewed by a suited and booted panel of six people, including a large bear of a man who had sat to my left and asked awkward questions. It was the first time I had met the person with whom I was about to share so many years, Riverside's general manager, Geoff Norman.

And so it was, early on one sunny but cold day, feeling very new and slightly lost, I drove my battered old red Toyota up to the barrier which closed off the car parks from the public before the centre opened its doors each weekday.

The pre-Christmas winter's sun sat low and in my eyes as, feeling those first-day butterflies which always accompanied me to any new job, I drove slowly round from the barrier to the staff car park at Riverside to be met by a pair of incongruously bright azure eyes. They belonged to Henry, a friendly blonde-haired security guard with chiselled features and wearing trendy day-old stubble.

Henry spent the next ten years of my time there apparently so high that passing aircraft had to detour round him. In all the following years that I spent at the centre we never found any drugs on him or in his locker, but if he wasn't on a chemical high he had to be one of the most naturally laid-back souls ever to walk Mandon's streets.

Safely parked up miles from the 'real' shoppers, I ambled the ten minute walk to the main Reception area, self- conscious in my suit and shoes whose shine bore testament to their very newness. It was time to get reacquainted with my boss, Geoff Norman, the triangular-shaped mini mountain of a man.

I tried the doors to the malls and found them locked; the public wouldn't be allowed in for another hour at least. I hadn't counted on this and stood uncertainly, puzzled as to what to do, and now feeling slightly nervous as it looked like I may be late on my very first day.

A grey-haired man in a grubby Riverside high visibility jacket with friendly grey eyes blinking owlishly from behind oversized glasses saw my predicament and came over.

Ohroight? he said pleasantly, in a soft southern Irish accent.

I explained I was lost and need to get to the management offices but the doors were locked and so I had no idea how to get there.

Acorrrs he said gently, ifyehfollwsmeI'llshowsyehthewaysoir.

I hadn't a clue what he had said and I must have looked nonplussed so he decided that clearly he was dealing with an idiot and would therefore need to use sign language. Smiling at me slightly warily as if I were on day release from a secure institution he crooked a finger for me to follow him and in companiable silence we walked together through a service corridor and into the main mall. Once inside, I knew the way and so, thanking the man, headed off for the management offices.

As I walked, Christmas lights twinkled gaily among smoked glass and coloured marble awaiting the herds of shoppers – without a smile among them – who in less than an hour would start to grudgingly complete their shopping in time for the Festive season about which they would spend so much of January complaining.

Riverside's Reception area was a throwback to years gone by. Its neon lights reflected off the black linoleum on the floor and in the corner sat a saggy black leather sofa which had seen better days but fitted in perfectly to the overall ambience. Appropriately sited next to the main customer toilets, Reception was so close by that it couldn't quite shrug off the last wafts from the nearby facilities.

As I pulled open the heavy blue wooden double doors I was met by the sight of a thin, vigorously protesting man in a baggy vest miserably pulling on the padded bottom half of a Fat Controller costume of Thomas the Tank Engine fame, under the glowering gaze of a stern-faced woman in her 40s.

I don' wanna... he wailed

Shut up Steve said the woman severely, you will do it 'cos you're the only one who will fit!

Arms folded and high heeled boots tapping impatiently on the dark floor of Reception there would be only one winner and Steve knew it. With a pinched look he silently slipped on the Fat Controller's smiling head and, squaring his shoulders, marched off onto the shopfloor to make some children's Festive day.

The woman – slim, with greying light brown hair fringing her shoulders and wearing the harassed air of a mother and Riverside long-timer - sighed and turned to me.

You must be Gordon she said, holding out an elegant hand.

Welcome to the madhouse. I'm Maria.

Poor Steve. Apparently he was the only adult working for Riverside who could fit into most of the costumes which arrived that season and the centre was too cash-strapped to hire a professional, so the unfortunate man ended up as any number of characters.

On that first day everything served to reinforce just how little I knew.

Trailing after Maria, I was given a brief tour of the main office: a large, airy open plan space filled with cheery looking people. She showed me the management kitchen area, with its battered sink and slightly whiffy 'fridge and of course the way to the toilets, whose heavy polished wooden doors and gilded varnished signage bore testimony to their age; original fixtures from when the place had been built.

And then she ushered me up a metal staircase which led from the corridor outside the main office and up through the roof. I had assumed it was an emergency exit and in this I was half right: the staircase did lead to an emergency door onto the roof. It also was the only way to get to the marketing office.

This was something they didn't show you at interview. The office in which I'd be working was one of a series of temporary buildings bolted together and loosely attached to the roof of Riverside like aged birds' nests.

I was greeted warmly by my new team and settled into my desk, one of six identical work areas in another small open plan office. This one had metal walls and a pervading smell of damp, which stained the carpet in places and brown streaks showed where water had run down some of the joins in the walls. On the plus side it had air conditioning and excellent heating. I quickly realised that it also had two other sought-after features: natural daylight and being separate from the main office, which allowed some unholy bitching to go on when we were having a bad day.

I looked out across the rooftops of Mandon town centre, watching some stormy grey winter clouds scud across an angry sky which promised an early end to daylight that December's day. And then I felt it: as the wind gusted there was a small but definite lurch in the office floor, the place creaked slightly and I could have sworn it all moved.

Bloody hell! What was that?! I cried.

Maria looked up, unconcerned and smiling.

Ah yes, forgot to tell you about that. The whole place moves a bit when it's windy, but don't worry, you'll soon get used to it.

After a while, I decided I ought to offer to make tea or coffee for my new colleagues, which was gratefully accepted. I grabbed a tray from a small festering pile underneath one of the desks – the housekeeping upstairs in our office clearly needed a little updating – and walked down the short corridor to the top of the metal staircase which led down one floor to the kitchen. There were hoots of laughter from my team and I realised that I was walking gingerly,