How Middle England was spared the dark satanic shopping malls

摘要

'We've stopped all them malls now outside towns. This is the first year we've done more building inside towns than outside. Even though I get a lot of pressure about it, I think it's right. We want people back in our cities.' So announced deputy prime minister John Prescott to the architecture correspondent of The Times a couple of weeks ago. Read slowly some of his random thoughts sounded almost Churchillian; 'We stopped all them malls now outside towns,' for example, and 'We want people back in our cities'. It was almost as though he and the Labour Party had been locked in a life and death struggle with an intractable enemy ever since they seized power in 1997 and that they had only just been relieved after years in the frontline.