It was the first beautiful day of 2023 and everyone in the country was in a park, except for me. I was in Westfield’s west London outpost, in Shepherd’s Bush. I’m not allowed to write about the kids any more – I’ve had article eight of the Human Rights Act thrown at me – so let’s just say that two children belonging to someone else made me do it.
I hadn’t set foot in the place since 30 October 2008, when I covered its opening, which was newsworthy because it was the largest covered shopping centre in the UK. Boris Johnson had recently been elected as mayor of London; the country was yet to clock how tragic the consequences of that would be. He was at the opening, but I missed him because I ran into my school friend’s mum.
Everything has changed, everything has remained the same. Well, there are a load of Korean wares now – bubble tea, makeup – which is why this stranger’s children forced me there in the first place, but the M&S is still standing. John Lewis is there now, but these days is happy to be knowingly undersold, having dropped its 97-year-old slogan last year, although you wouldn’t notice to look around. You would just think: “Is the market for slacks and Le Creuset pepper grinders still that hot?”
Oh, there has been one other change, just a small thing, really: all our underpinning assumptions about capitalism. We don’t even call it that any more, we call it “late capitalism”, a phrase I used to like, because it made it sound like it was nearly over, but now hate, because it makes it sound exploitative and discourteous.
When this place opened, it had a strong tang of metaphor: it was so shiny yet so windowless, so vast yet so repetitive, that you felt blessed to be allowed in and also completely disoriented, separated from any sense of place, unconscious of time. Have I been here an hour or a day? Is Johnson still around? Would a proper newshound try to find him or was that so long ago that he is in the Cotswolds now? How far have I walked, to get from that shoe shop to this very similar one? Am I hungry or just empty?
Headlines called it things like a “temple of consumerism”. Lehman Brothers had collapsed only a few weeks before and it felt like the brink of a new era. Bankers would be put in prison, surely; we would realise that financialisation was destroying prosperity; 30 years of free market fundamentalism would have to give way to a leftwing agenda of redistribution and equality, which someone must have ready to go. We have been to enough meetings.
What a weird time to open a temple of consumerism – at the very moment when materialism was about to topple off its plinth, like that statue of Saddam Hussein. And yet, what a perfect time to open a place full of stuff you don’t need that baffles the senses. We had been living in a cheap-debt dream and we were about to wake up.
If you had told me then that the financial crash would be paid for entirely by regular people – who didn’t even know what a collateralised debt obligation was until five minutes before, yet saw their incomes stagnate and their public services decline for years, with the result that, 15 years hence, the whole OECD is living in a necropolitical nightmare, the violent fantasies of government rhetoric our only fireworks in a landscape of grinding penury – I would have … well, I don’t know what I would have done. But I definitely wouldn’t have lost an unknowable number of hours asking my friend’s mum how her extended family was doing in Cork. I would have been more worried.
Westfield still has an air of timelessness, with an additional layer of confusion now that there are Bentleys parked on the concourse, so you don’t know whether you are indoors or outdoors. It’s still a metaphor for something, although I can’t yet tell you what. I’ll come back to you in 15 years.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
