T JUST before 9am on a Saturday morning, Braehead shopping centre, in Renfrew, feels less like a traditional British high street stirring for the day and more like a medieval city-state preparing to raise the portcullis. Protective grilles slide up, transforming individual stores from fortresses into welcoming retail experiences.
A 30-something assistant pulls the cover from her calendar concession with a reverential sweep, exposing the icons and martyrs whose faces will accompany us through 2010 – Michael Jackson, Cheryl Cole and Peter Andre.
Grace Johnstone, cleaning supervisor
Most housekeeping at Braehead gets done before the centre opens, but if you arrive first thing you might be lucky enough to spot one of the motorised floor-cleaners disappearing through double doors, like a badger returning to its sett. From a vantage point on the upper level, I admire the technique of Ian Gibson (56), from Clydebank, as he polishes the glass sides of an escalator. Up and down he glides, leaning over the hand-rail, a green cloth in each hand, cleaning both sides at once with brisk circling movements, all elegance and energy. "It's murder when the escalators are not on, but," he grins, "and you've got to walk up and doon."
Catherine and Margaret, two elderly ladies from Glasgow, are among the first visitors of the day. They are small, anorak-clad, each carrying a single black bag. "My sister and I don't bother with these shops," says Margaret, waving a woollen glove disdainfully in the direction of a window display of floral bras and knickers. "We just come for a cup of tea and a blether."
I would have put money on Catherine and Margaret choosing Aulds for their blether, but I later see them sitting by McDonald's. During the 12 hours I spend in Braehead, McDonald's consistently draws crowds. The baked potato place on the other side of the food court is, by contrast, very quiet. In a tableau not without pathos, baseball-capped counter staff stand behind a sign promising, "We've dropped the price of our spuds."
I've come to Braehead because it's worth paying attention to anywhere so popular. Around 3,500 people work in the mall, and in an average week a quarter of a million people shop here, rising to 400,000 in November and December. A great many of us are spending our work and leisure time in this shopping centre and others like it. Churches, football clubs and tourist attractions would envy those attendance figures.
Yet shopping centres remain under the radar and unconsidered. Even when we are within them, we don't think much about them. This is, in part, deliberate; shopping centres are designed and run so that visitors don't get distracted from spending money. Really, though, they are fascinating. The largest are like towns in their own right – full of characters and drama. Braehead produces around 1,300 tonnes of waste each year and about a million stories.
The way we shop can, for example, reveal a lot about how we live and how we feel. According to Lesley Douglas, the general manager of Boots at Braehead, since the economic crisis, her shop has been selling a greater number of treatments for anxiety and depression. "But," she says, "it's amazing how a woman can cheer herself up by buying a red lipstick."
It's strange visiting a shopping centre and not doing any shopping; rather like being sober at a party. But it allows you to really pay attention, which can be rewarding. According to the old Japanese proverb, if you sit by the river for long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by. Similarly, if you plonk yourself down between Topshop and Claire's, you will hear interesting snatches of conversation: "I'll need to phone Betty and let her know I found the red glittery shoes"; "If someone hit you in the face with a shovel you'd know all about it"; "The trouble with her is she doesn't know her arse from her you-know-what!"
Shoppers take a break
Braehead could not in truth be called beautiful. It has the same kind of professionally executed blankness that characterises hotels and airports, other structures with transience at their core. The colour scheme of its almost one million square feet is mostly white (one of the painters compares his job to painting the Forth Bridge, "but warmer") and the glass roof is criss-crossed with girders against which a lost Igglepiggle balloon bumps mournfully.
After a while, though, you begin to appreciate the secret aesthetics of the place – the silver bins that approximate the shape of offices at Canary Wharf, the honeyed sunlight slanting through the roof, a beautiful young woman with black nail polish and a tartan scarf buying a copy of Catcher In The Rye. You also begin to notice how weird shops can be: the disturbing Wicker Man-ish stag's head on a mannequin in the window of River Island, for instance, or the shelves of polystyrene skulls that make a Golgotha of Birthdays. Oddly, near the food court, there's even an old-fashioned carousel. Children sit on the mechanical horses and wave to their parents every five seconds. Randall Taylor, 61, operating the ride, is stocky and steely-haired in a gingham shirt and navy braces. He grew up travelling around Britain and Ireland. "It's been in my family for generations," he says. "My great-grandfather was a stevedore in Kirkcaldy then he went to Paris on holiday and when he came back he set up in fairgrounds. It used to be a way of life but now it's just a business. It's about survival." He's been in Braehead since May; Majorca before that. "But that was hopeless. No one was spending money."
Better weather, though. Outside, there's driving rain, and in one spot it has begun to leak through the roof. A ned leans over the balcony to catch drips which he then rubs on his girlfriend's back. "Hi!" she says. "That's disgustin'! F***in' chuck it!" She is wearing the inevitable Ugg boots and has, in common with approximately 80 per cent of young women between 15 and 25 in Braehead today, a low side parting and a fringe slanting across the forehead at 45 degrees; it's a sort of feminised version of the Archie MacPherson comb-over.
Walking past in the opposite direction are James and Dorothy Whyte. He is 80 and looks a bit like Eric Sykes. He has on a fedora, check jacket, cords, a red jumper and tie. He holds his wife, who is 78, by the arm and points with his stick at a box of chocs in the window of Thornton's. "They're not good for you," she admonishes, playfully. He just laughs.
"We always go for a day out on Saturday," he says. "Sometimes we go to Sauchiehall Street, sometimes to Argyle Street, sometimes here. We've had our lunch and a pot of tea. We've been here for about four hours."
"We're from Dumbarton, you see," Mrs Whyte explains. "And there isn't much there."
Simon Lennox, 33, and his girlfriend Lynsey McNicol, 24, are reclining on massage chairs next to the food court, sucking smoothies through straws. "I'm having a massage because I'm feeling a bit tense," he says. "I've not been sleeping very well. I'm trying to buy a house but I need to be careful about the price. So I'm looking for a 'do-er upper' or something that's been repossessed."
Robert Kelly, known as 'Red' on account of his ginger quiff, is walking along with his arm round ten-year-old daughter Isobel. "We're down from the Highlands to go to the Xscape," he says. Xscape is the leisure complex next to the shopping centre which offers, among other attractions, an indoor mountain covered in snow. Quite different from Red Kelly's own business – selling Elvis Presley vinyl from the Sutherland village of Helmsdale.
Braehead is an unusual – but supremely Scottish – shopping centre in that it features its very own curling rink. I watch four members of the Glasgow Ladies Curling Club sweeping the ice like it's a tenement stair, sliding after the stone like Degas dancers. The team have been together for 30 years, and in 2008 won silver at the senior world championships in Finland. "The dreaded Canadians diddled us again," says Judy Mackenzie, who is tall and regal with silver hair and dark eyebrows.
As I'm talking to Mackenzie in the cafe next to the curling rink, a Royal Navy destroyer glides past the window. The shopping centre is beside the Clyde and so employs a boatman. Michael Cleary, 50, patrols the river in a small, fast motorboat. His job is to remove debris around the boardwalk and also to deal with people in trouble by the water. Braehead has a live events arena, and it has been known for punters to try to sneak in by jumping the fences and clambering, in the dark, along the slippery rocks under the boardwalk. "They're crazy," he says, shaking his head.
Michael Cleary is the centre's boatman
Cleary loves the water; knows nothing else. He started with the Merchant Navy when he was 16 and saw the world. Then he worked in the North Sea until a terrible accident. "I was on a supply vessel when a big wave carried me up against a steel bulkhead. I was lucky not to get washed over the side, but I smashed my left foot and ankle. My heel basically disintegrated."
He was laid up for three years, becalmed on his sofa, until this job came along. "Everybody goes, 'Pfff, how did you end up in a shopping centre?' But I like boats and they've got one."
All the time I have been walking around talking to people, I have been observed by some of the 258 cameras positioned inside and outside the shopping centre. Security is a priority. Any place where there are so many people, but in particular a place that could be considered emblematic of western capitalism, has to take seriously the terrorist threat.
Then there are more prosaic security issues, though no less alarming for those involved. Two or three children are lost in the centre every day, but according to general manager Peter Beagley they are usually found within 20 minutes. Beagley is a former tank commander who served during the first Gulf War, so we can assume he doesn't lack mental toughness, but he is happy to admit that his is a high-pressure job that can cause sleepless nights. "I'm only 44 and I'm grey," he says. "I worry about all things at all times." On the wall of his office there is a complicated poster titled Crisis Management Methodology Chart.
Gareth Gilles, security supervisor
The security cameras feed back to the control room, described by Beagley as "the heart of the whole business". It is a dim space, full of computers and screens which will suggest to anyone of a certain age and inclination the bridge of the USS Enterprise. The constant rumbling like jets flying overhead is in fact caused by curling stones. We are directly beneath the rink.
Against the far wall, 14 large screens surround an even larger central one known as the "incident monitor" which will display any scene of particular concern. These screens are being monitored by Mark Webster, 34, who has close-cropped hair and tattoos on his forearms of the Grim Reaper and an eagle carrying a "Scotland" scroll. He is the first point of contact for any problems, from a broken door to a fire to a lost child, and will direct the response from here.
Webster is contacted on the radio by one of the police officers who patrol the shopping centre. She has spotted a man and two women who seemed to be watching her carefully and acting a little nervously. Now they have gone into River Island. When the suspected shoplifters come out, while simultaneously directing a cleaner to attend a spillage outside Topman, Webster follows them through the centre with his cameras. They have the sunken sallowness of drug addicts.
"The one in the purple looks a bit funny," says Webster. "The police are going to see if they can eyeball them. I don't recognise them."
In the control room they keep a folder full of names and mugshots of known shoplifters, and the often sophisticated techniques they favour. As the shopping centre is outwith the city, Braehead doesn't suffer much from neds stealing things. It tends to be professional shoplifters coming in organised teams. Before now, Webster has prevented someone from leaving with £5,000 worth of clothes.
It is his job to prevent these professionals from doing their job. "Cat and mouse," he says. Webster directs security guards to go where the man and women can see them, to give them the idea that they are being watched. If they are indeed shoplifters, this deterrent seems to work; they hunker down in KFC, swapping nicking for chicken. "That's possibly been enough to stop them," says Webster. "For the day at least."
It's odd to go back out into the centre and see the shops and people after watching them on screen. As the day wears on, Braehead gets busier. The air feels warm and it becomes impossible to walk in straight lines. There's too much to notice. The woman in tears in Starbucks. The gothy girl in a 'Meat Is Murder' T-shirt eating a Big Mac. The toddler who seems about to fall down the stairs in pursuit of his balloon. "Some parents just don't give a shit," says a security guard, jovially.
I'm overstimulated and it's time to go. But first, between WH Smith and New Look, there's a fascinating scene – people are queueing at a stall with a sign that reads: "Beat the credit crunch. We will buy your gold for cash." Two men in neat suits squint at the jewellery of seated women then make an offer. Most take the cash. Some of them make straight for the bank and pay it in. Others head back to the shops.
"There's a lot of money flowing through here," one of the men behind the counter tells me. He has burns on his thumbs from the acid used to test the gold. "Transactions start at £5 and last week I had one as high as £5,000. People are needing to find ways to pay for holidays and Christmas."
This stall seems a hairline fracture in the facade of consumer confidence. How strange and sad to think of all those rings and necklaces, those golden keepsakes and precious promises, being sold for cash. Someone earlier had said they could never work in a shopping centre because it's too artificial an environment, but it seems to me that they can be very real and emotional places – thick with desire and even desperation.
It's a relief, frankly, to wander over to Marks & Spencer where a DJ is playing Baby One More Time at a volume that renders coherent thought impossible. "It's too loud!" says an old lady browsing the frocks. "Och, stop mumpin' and moanin', Jean," says her pal. "It's the weekend after all."
This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009
