Westfield London

Last Friday on my day off I thought I would go and visit the newly opened Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherds Bush… I have been reading that it is the largest indoor shopping centre in Europe. However, on the same page as the previous information in Wikipedia, it says that it is the third largest shopping centre in the UK. Unless I am missing something, the two previous statements contradict each other.. hey, I am not saying this, I am just repeating what I have read!

Anyway, it makes me think what something like the Westfield shopping centre does to shopping centres in Bluewater and Lakeside.. also, in Central London, Oxford Street is the busiest.. with the opening of the Westfield shopping centre in London, what does it mean for them now? I wish I could answer that and if I had the time I would go for a wander to the other shopping areas to see.

However, my visit to the Westfield shopping centre was on their second day of opening. I came out of Shepherds Bush station and was pleasantly surprised… they have done the station up and it looks modern and can handle the capacity of all these new found shoppers.

The walk up to the centre itself from the station is a mere 5 minutes or so but it was pretty impressive. Modern architecture and designer looking buildings make it so much more pleasing to the eye. To be honest, I am not a shopping fan but something out of the ordinary shopping centres makes things more interesting.

Being new however, I noticed on the walk up to the shopping centre, there were cash points which were not working. There were also a few shops which had not completely open.. in that I mean some were not open at all and some obviously had some snags.. there was one restaurant where you had to pay cash only as they hadn’t got their card payment systems in place as yet.

The amount of people in the centre was phenomenal.. being a Friday when I expected the majority of people to be at work didn’t make it make a difference. Perhaps people had taken a day off to visit, or these were people who had been laid off due to the credit crunch.. I don’t know but whatever it was, there were way too many people..

We were hoping to have a late lunch in the food hall.. it was around 3pm by this time but the whole place was chokka.. we could not get a seat at all. The decor was pretty impressive though, all designer chairs and tables.. very impressive. We ended up buying some wraps at M&S and munching our food whilst browsing.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took