This project looks at shopping centres constructed over the course of the 1970s, a period of prolific construction for large-scale, enclosed retail complexes in towns and cities across Britain. It seeks to contextualise these developments within an historical, urban and cultural fabric to understand how shopping centres are integrated into existing landscapes. Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the nineteenth-century arcade as a catalyst for uncovering lost histories and past modernities, this project seeks to understand the role that shopping centres played within the built environment over time.

My research combines art historical literature on the design, visual culture and modes of representation with scholarship on the urban environment to situate the shopping centre within wider discussions about how space and place is navigated and understood. Using contemporaneous debates on topics such as heritage, “Englishness” vs Americanisation, consumerism and “taste”, I seek to contribute to an emerging academic discourse on postwar commercial modernism. By focusing on the (re)production of spaces of consumption over time, I will investigate how attitudes to the design and use of the built (shopping) environment have changed, and are charging, at a moment when shopping centres face an increasingly uncertain future.