From The waste land to Past‐present fuchsia: The re‐development of the Broadmead Shopping Centre

Abstract

Two places in the UK city of Bristol, Broadmead Shopping Centre and the new Cabot Circus Mall, are currently undergoing a process of reordering, reorganising and recycling. The paper offers a reflection on the physical and hyperreal places produced by these processes and the effect of their organisational dynamics. It juxtaposes readings of the places based on a psychogeographical method known as the dérive with images of the sites and other texts: T.S. Eliot’s The waste land and Ralph Hoyte’s Past‐present fuchsia. The latter is a text‐based artwork on the hoardings around the Cabot Circus building site. Places and poetry are related to Bauman’s concepts of heavy and liquid modernity. Insights are developed into their relationship with waste which Broadmead attempts, unsuccessfully, to exclude and Cabot Circus to recycle. Broadmead therefore retains a connection to realities increasingly threatened by spectacle and commodification.

Keywords:

• shopping mall
• psychogeography
• heavy modernity
• liquid modernity
• garbage

Notes

1. Photographic and graphic images of Past‐present fuchsia are taken from the Bristol Alliance Arts Programme website. Other photographs were taken by the author.

2. Bluewater is one of the largest shopping malls in the UK. It excluded ‘hoodies’ on the grounds that they indulged in anti‐social behaviour such as swearing and intimidated shoppers (Mall bans shoppers’ hooded tops 2005; Visitor rise at ‘hoodie’ ban mall 2005).

3. It is ironic that this building was part of a monastery founded for an order of Dominican Friars, committed to teaching and preaching the gospel and to a life of obedience, chastity and poverty. Another building in the area known as Quakers Friars was formerly a Friends meeting house.