The propaganda hits you
the minute you see the sky-high brand name hieroglyphs. Giant smiling families
gazing down over the entrance to a Mothercare. ‘M&S’ hanging like a massive
totem. Floating retail commandments in single words, Breathe, Eat, Relax,
Play...
About a
year ago I went out on the streets in the thick of one of the worst riots in
Manchester’s history since Peterloo, tail-ending the spectacularly violent
summer of 2011 when a chain of British cities erupted in flames and looting.
Having observed the hooded kids kicking in the doors of sportswear and mobile
phone chain stores, I made the observation that for a generation
programmed for retail, the sight of them looting a Foot Locker or a Carphone
Warehouse wasn’t so much a street protest as a very forceful method of going
shopping.
Only a couple
of months later Europe’s largest mall opened up in Stratford on the Olympic
site, a high security glass compound overshadowing the old indoor market, where
proprietors are presumably looking forward to an Olympian record of
bankruptcies now they have to compete with Xanadu over the road. It's colossal.
Step out of the station and the sheer size of it knocks the wind out of you.
You're wafted up a hill by obliging escalator beneath ceilings thirty foot
high and giant flagship brands. Gleaming concourses mopped by immigrant
sponges. Bent metal rods sticking out of the ground posing as sculpture. Downstairs
there’s a prefab pub calling itself a Microbrewery with all the atmosphere of
an antiseptic wipe.
One of the first
things you notice is how small you feel. That’s what monumental architecture
does, with its curtain wall cliffs, its glass canyons. It shrinks the human
being. Just to get from M&S to Accessorize takes about two and a half days.
So why? Why
does it all have to make you feel so insignificant?
Westfield
Stratford isn’t a mall, it’s a monument. It’s a Great Exhibition Crystal Palace
reborn for the age of retail. Just as that 1851 glass-walled construction
embodied British might and bullishness at the peak of empire, so does Westfield
justify shopping as the beating heart of the consumer society. It’s not
agit-prop, it’s agit-shop. Covered arcades wide enough to house the chariot for
a triumphal emperor? Spurious justification by government with words like
‘empowerment’ and ‘community’? Check, check. It’s not architectural shock and
awe. It’s shop and awe.
Breathe.
Eat.
Relax.
Play.
Wandering around Westfield made
me think back to those riots. Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps I oversimplified
things. I don’t think it’s incorrect to say unchecked materialism was one of
the reasons people rioted, but it was only one of the reasons. There are lots of reasons why people riot. Because they’re
angry. Because of peer pressure. I learnt a lot when I watched Manchester
become a temporary minor war zone, and here’s one thing I learnt: that just
like any other kind of social activity, a lot of the people involved are just
sort of hanging
round. No
program, no target. As things got violent, some of them got violent. As things
got nicked, some of them nicked things. It’s the way crowds work. Probably a
good third of all the kids at the riots were little more than rubberneckers
caught up in something they hardly comprehended. Throwing a stone at a luxury
hotel, baiting a helmeted cop. Scooping up a discarded bottle of Evian or a bag
of crisps, the way kids do. Some of them got prison sentences.
Eat.
Relax.
Play.
Breathe.
You look up at the Westfield
Stratford complex and you know there could never be riots here. It’s a fortress
protected by reinforced glass and CCTV. The ceilings stretch away from you.
You’d never even reach.
I wandered out of the mall and
onto the little bridge where an oily sun was descending over east London.
Stretching away below me I could see late-stage preparations in the final push
towards the Olympics: gates, watchtowers, electrified fencing, yellow coats,
passes, wires, cameras. I watched it and I remembered back to that night. I recalled the
broken glass and the flames and the sirens, and I thought about the other
reason people riot. It’s one that I’ve never really come out and admitted, and
yet it’s possibly the most powerful one of all, and it explains soccer
hooligans, and pub fights, and the buildings burning in Athens, and lynchings,
and just about any other descent into mob horror we see around us. I didn’t
break the law once that night, and I don’t support looting or violence - but
there was a moment when I stood watching the crowd surging and the glass
breaking around me, and I can’t deny that I felt the thrill of it all. Perhaps
that’s the final reason people riot. Because when you’re caught up in the whole
thing, it’s just sort of fun.
