The Shopping Precinct

This chapter discusses the emergence of the shopping precinct as a distinct urban form in the mid-twentieth century and how it would come to reshape Britain's urban environment. Britons often use the words “shopping precinct,” “shopping center,” and “shopping mall” interchangeably. These terms are used to refer to the hundreds of comprehensively planned developments housing multiple different shops that punctuate British towns and cities in a way that is both banal and familia. The chapter dispenses with the term “shopping center,” and preserves an important distinction between the “shopping precinct” and “shopping mall.” It presents a historical argument about the development of British spaces over the twentieth century. The chapter focuses on the example of Gibson's precinct in Coventry — one of the first and arguably most extravagant of the wave of the postwar shopping precinct. Ultimately, the chapter dwells on the strange historical conditions surrounding the birth of the American shopping mall.