Bluewater is what is known as a ‘car park-led’ project; most of the quarry floor is parking space, the strange retro-futurist construction (by a firm of architects called Benoy) is tacked on, a desert camp. Taliban chic: a very expensive (£370 million) hideaway in a deep chalk bunker. Temporary permanence. The shopping centre shares this characteristic with Lord Rogers’s Millennium Dome. To gel with restless M25 consciousness, Bluewater has been designed to feel like a one-night stopover, an oasis for migrants. The huge tents that once sheltered London’s smallpox cases on Temple Hill are the inspiration for this collision of ribbed domes and curved windows. The American architectural consultant Eric Kuhne, invited to talk up the site, spoke of ‘a new kind of city’. A ‘resort’. Rest and recreation for vacationers.
A form of petrol-guzzling tourism has evolved: Bluewater is a Ballardian resort (Vermilion Sands), shopping is secondary, punters come here to be part of the spectacle. The North Kent quarry is an unanchored destination: nobody is quite sure where it is. It’s never in the same place twice. The surrounding road systems are so complex — FOLLOW THE SIGN FOR CANTERBURY— trippers can’t work out which side of the Thames they’re on. They arrive exhausted. They depart half-dead. They’ve taken part in the experience of travel. They’ve seen the car park. Too weary to walk, they stumble into the ‘leisure village’ with its artificial day-for-night lighting. The place is a gigantic upgrade of Margate’s Dreamland arcade: glittery cargo behind glass, get-lucky trash you don’t want (but try to win), fast food. Bluewater combines slot-machine avenues with fun fair rides: escalators, lifts, cinemas, indoor jungles, pools, boating lakes, climbing walls and even, yes, cycle hire and a ‘discovery trail’. Your ‘hosts’ (welcome, campers) are trained in sign language. There are Braille maps and personal guides for the visually impaired.
From above, Bluewater looks fine: sunlight glancing off pastiched oast houses. Petit doesn’t risk a smile, he uncreases his Jesuitical frown. There is purpose to his expedition, he wants to buy a pair of Y-fronts; but this is no simple commercial transaction, he has roamed half the country, from Cribbs Causeway (outside Bristol) to Asda (Eastbourne), to Lakeside (Thurrock). No joy. The man is a perfectionist. One day, so he believes, he will discover the M&S graiclass="underline" right weight, style, fit. The Look. The correct gear for the proverbial road accident: no shameful moment on the trolley, if he finds himself taken into Darent Valley Hospital.
At first, Bluewater provokes such impulses. It’s like arriving at a Channel port; the transit point becomes a destination. Dover, Folkestone. The same grid of cars. The same concern about getting into the right stream. High white cliffs. Visible evidence of wartime activity; tunnels, huts, gun emplacements. Security (discreet but firm). The dizzy sense of impermanence, not being where you are; exhausted from travel and anticipating more of the same. Customs paranoia. Worries about having left your passport, tickets, green forms, in the kitchen drawer.
We set off in search of duty frees, an investigation of this inland port. It’s not England and it’s not France; it’s more like the US without the genetically modified mall addicts, the mutated burger herds. But Bluewater excursionists are not regarded as urban terrorists if they don’t buy buy buy. Thank God. Because nobody has the stamina to shop, to make a decision.
You meet trembling humans who have lost their cars: green zone or blue? The Heathrow experience, jet-lagged, combing the ranks, struggling with heavy bags: which terminal was it, which floor? Tilbury, the old port for London, with its many platforms and shuttle of trains, has died; an echoing ghost. Bluewater (no access by river) has sixty buses per hour, 130 trains per day, five taxi ranks and colour-coded car parks without number.
The design is stolen from the Victorian asylums, from Joyce Green Hospitaclass="underline" a broad V, within a box (or Rubik’s Cube). The three barbicans that command the points of the V are House of Fraser, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer. There is an upper and a lower mall. The temperature is unnatural; so temperate that it drives you mad. You can’t sweat. You’re blow-dried. You can’t breathe. Air is recycled as in an airliner. You’re supposed to make those air-terminal, duty-free, impulse purchases that you come to regret: shirts that never leave the bag, rubber-sealed bottles of cherries in brandy, lighters for those who don’t smoke. Airport consumption is reflex superstition: buy and live.
The toilets are too clean for England and they’re open; our cities have long since dispensed with such philanthropic frivolities, converting every pissy trench into a wine-bar or body-tanning facility. Bluewater is the only safe way to visit America, it’s the post-11 September destination of choice. Heathrow without the hassle. Then take your pick of: Santa Fe (‘South Western American restaurant and Cocktail Bar… authentic and exciting’), Ed’s (‘Authentic 50s American diner’), Tootsies (‘Authentic American family restaurant in a stylish setting’). Plus: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the multiplex with blockbuster buckets of popcorn and hogsheads of energy-boosting drinks. These days, only the fake is truly authentic.
Rachel Lichtenstein, author of Rodinsky’s Room, was dragged here to choose a wedding dress. She lived in Hackney, her mother in Southend: Bluewater was the obvious rendezvous. Twenty minutes on the malls and the ceremony was about to be called off, while Rachel fled to a house of study in the desert. A life of abstinence and prayer. Bluewater’s anodyne aquarium walkways provoke many such dramas. The Kenneth Baker anthology of uplifting poems, in relief on every wall, incubates rage. I was ready to tear out the tablets with my fingernails and smash them down on the heads of inoffensive mall-grazers.
A Tate Modern gallery of male underwear fails to satisfy Petit; a mournful shrug and he’s away through the revolving doors. It’s a great cultural event, melancholy as Wim Wenders, watching Petit work a retail outlet. Shopper as aesthete. He tracks, he drifts; he won’t stoop to examine a label or a price tag. The nostrils flare. The stern eyebrows twitch. Some hideous vulgarity, in terms of colour or texture, has been enacted. Behind the mask of disdain, this man is supremely alert, sunk into a trance of mesmeric concentration. Indifference as the ultimate accolade. Bluewater fails, Bluewater must be consigned — like some wretched film or novel — to silence, scorn: the heartrending sigh of a seeker who has reached out and grasped disappointment. A spoonful of volcanic dust. Petit quits the quarry like a vampire hunter promised wolves and fly-eating maniacs, then fobbed off with a drip of born-again vegans.
The displays of underwear, boots, lipstick — kit — have a disembodied sexuality. Palace of consumer fetishism as art gallery isn’t a perverse reading. The ‘Dalí Universe’ at London’s decommissioned County Hall is conducting a phone poll (calclass="underline" 0901 151 0133) to decide on the best site for a ‘sculpture based on a Dalí painting’. Should Profile of Time be exhibited at Hampton Court Palace, in Kensington Gardens, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew — or at Bluewater? No contest. Bluewater, the posthumous dream of Walter Benjamin, is the clear favourite. The Dalí painting from which the sculpture has been concocted was first shown in 1931. Title? The Persistence of Memory.
The payback for my trip to Bluewater is Petit’s company on our attempt to cross the Thames (22 October 1999). Research has made it abundantly clear: the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge cannot be negotiated on foot. Neither can we rush the Dartford Tunnel (like desperate asylum seekers from the Calais camp). The best option is a long detour, by river path, to Gravesend. A ferry trip. A slog from Tilbury to Grays (returning us to the bridge and the reborn M25).