Come and worship...

Anyone who knows me will be aware that I rate the activity of shopping slightly below dental treatment in the scale of pleasurable pastimes. In fact, normally, I will do everything in my power to avoid shops altogether.
However, earlier this week, I spent a few days helping my eldest daughter to move house from one part of the great city of Manchester to another part of that same city. I really enjoyed the opportunity to spend a few days with her before her imminent wedding. I also (believe it or not) enjoyed building up all the flat-pack furniture- a bedside cabinet, a wardrobe and three bookcases. [By the time I got to bookcase number three I was an expert!]
However, it was also necessary to visit some shops during the course of my few days of being a one-man house-removal firm. And one of those expeditions into (for me) virtually foreign territory took us to The Trafford Centre, pictured above.
(I didn't have my camera with me so I have had to borrow a photograph from the Flickr site of Nicola Whitaker )
If you have not seen the Trafford Centre for yourself, you do not know what you are missing. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what I didn't miss!!
Believe me, this is one of the wonders of the modern world.... in a perverse sort of way.
Actually my first thought when we arrived was that somehow I had taken a detour and had accidentally ended up in Disneyworld. Well, for a start there are about 10,000 car-parking spaces. And everything looks like it has been manufactured out of resin. Then I wondered if I might be having an Alice-in-Wonderland moment.

Perhaps some people will find the Trafford Centre, and similar places (if there are any) to be places of inspiration and delight. To me it all seemed tackier than hot bitumen and as tasteful as tofu. (And, again, anyone who knows me will know what I think of tofu!)

Don't get me wrong- the place was utterly spotless and well-maintained, and clearly cost plenty of money to create, but to me it was the most over-the-top extravaganza I have seen in a long time.
In fact, I think that the Trafford Centre is to architecture what the Eurovision Song Contest is to music- i.e. there is some sort of relationship there but I don't quite know what it is.
I wonder what the reaction of some of my Kenyan friends might be to such a place?
But it set me thinking.
What is actually going on here?
Perhaps the explanation is simple: shopping has become a religion.
If the local superstore is the parish church of this new religion, giant retail parks like The Trafford Centre are the cathedrals and temples to the new gods. Like the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, these are places of pilgrimage for the consumer age, a homage to the gods of retail therapy and consumer credit.
The green domes of the Trafford Centre do look a bit like film-set copies of renaissance cathedrals. However, the main entrance is more of a Greek or Roman temple. (It's hard to tell which as all sorts of styles seem mixed up with each other.)
They are certainly places of sacrifice!
I know...
I ended up getting my credit card out too!

_The food hall... or maybe the deck of a luxury liner...