Fake plastic shoes: on walking to Westfield

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. That is made clear by the abundance of multi-lane roads and hulking metal, the sweeping layout, the pedestrian-unfriendly scale of the place. I've grown to love these kinds of vistas - blame a summer spent skirting the underbellies of American cities - but they're an acquired taste, not meant for the urban peripatetic viewer. Industrial Stratford on a bleak rain-laden Sunday is tough to romanticise.

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. To be honest, I don't think I'm meant to come to Westfield in the first place. I'm not the intended visitor: I buy all my clothes secondhand, pare down my possessions on a monthly basis, hate polyester, don't own a television, read a lot instead. And the (corporate chain) cafes in Westfield harbour no readers. Perhaps because in this vast complex there are hundreds of stores, but only one that sells books.

Westfield is a locum of rampant consumerism, but it's pretty good at self-disguise. Cinematic shopfronts dramatise buying things into a kind of epic glamour. A polished vision of purity temporarily strips visitors of any knots in their lives. All is simple and fixable! Happiness just a purchase away! Not content with merely promoting the mindless consumption of things as a solution to gnarly modernity, the sanitised mall also hides its inevitable detritus: the waste and pollution and underpaid staff and dodgy ethics and systematic unfairness. Everywhere smells of fake plastic shoes.

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. You're meant to be shipped in unawares, delivered by car or tube straight into the mouth of the mall so that you bypass the urban wilderness outside. That's what's particularly creepy, I think (aside from the irony that the pedestrian-unfriendly 'urban wilderness' was designed as part of the London 2012 Olympics campaign aiming to celebrate physical movement). The mall and its tube-fed transportation erase all sense of time and place. Road and rail encourage smooth transition into a realm that possesses no weather, no seasons, no natural light, no time, no face.

When I enter Westfield that wet Sunday morning most of the shops are still closed. Only a few souls roam the wide bleached walkways. It feels unearthly, futuristic even, so that when the sound system inexplicably emits Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire, a song that so personally embodies what it is to be alive, the empty space transforms his lusty wails into a plaintive, ghostly cry of the past.