International Malls: Queensgate Shopping Centre
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England - circa early '80s
I believe this mall opened in 1982, and is located in the city of Peterborough, which is in Cambridgeshire, England (about 90 miles north of London). Hey, wherever the heck it is, it looks nice to me in this postcard.
Current website: here
Previous entries: none
posted by Keith @ 10/12/2006
11 Comments:
The kind of malls us Americans didn't know existed back then in merry olde England!
Now that's a lovely mall. Wide open spaces and funky ceiling ornamentation. Is it still there? How can a mall not have a Web site?
Scott
For some reason, the British malls featured in these pages always have a certain brutalist look with what looks like massive concrete walls. Almost as if they wanted the malls to double as bomb shelters, should the need ever arise.
By the way, it does have a website at http://www.queensgate-shopping.co.uk/
so it apparently still exists. Anchored by Marks & Spencer and John Lewis, it seems.
Oops, here's a clickable link:
http://www.queensgate-shopping.co.uk/
Ha ha, Cora, you kill me.
Now that I see their Website, it's just a tiny thing.
Guys, I listed their "current website" (which also denotes that they're still around) in the entry, with this same link in there. :)
Hey Cora,
Did you use brackets over "url" to make that web address clickable?
I agree with Cora. The British malls we have seen featured so far look a bit cold and calulating in a bomb shelter sort of way. I think that is why I am not feeling it.
I used the standard "a href" html-tag in brackets, and it produces a nice clickable link.
My personal experience with British malls (spent one semester at university in London) does not quite match the concrete block look seen in these pages so far. The only British mall remotely similar in style that I visited was a relatively old one in Croydon, which was one of the first malls in Britain ever. The other London area malls, Brent Cross, Harrow Centre, etc... were a bit more subdued in their design than their US counterparts, but nowhere near the bomb shelter chic of this place. Watford, a town just northwest of London, finally had a spanking new and very pretty mall.
Oh man, did you check out the pictures of this place? Look in the media section of their web site!
Look at the upper walls and the ceilings! I think that is where the storm troopers from Star Wars were born!
Kev
My parents took me to this mall on a regular basis from 1983-1985. It had a really cheesy neon decoration which was my favorite part of the mall. When I visited it again in 2005, the decoration was gone. I was so bummed.
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