If you haven’t visited Westfield Stratford City yet, you really should. It is the greatest achievement of the post-Thatcher era in Britain, a cathedral to consumer capitalism. It freezes all the horror and fearful beauty of overpriced clothes, CDs, and electronics in a giant, static non-place that also happens to be the gateway to the Olympic Village. It is only to be hoped that it will be like this forever, and future generations look on it like we do the actual (medieval) cathedrals, wowing at the profound and lasting achievements of John Lewis or HMV like we do William of Wykeham or Bishop Alcock.

It is, of course, evil. First there’s the name. To no English speaker should it scan properly. ‘Westfield Stratford City’. Maybe ‘Westfield Stratford’… what’s ‘Stratford City’? Does no one question this? It’s something that a corporate agent has invented, an abstract concept that is as blank as the faces of the models in the windows (or the eyes of the consumers). And yet no one seems to question it. And that brings me on to the next point. The first thing that strikes you as you visit is that, even though this wasn’t there until, well, when I went to visit, yesterday, everyone inside is perfectly comfortable with their surroundings. They do not even seem that impressed. They just seem… content. They stumble from store-to-store, they pack their stomachs at the food courts, they pose with the expensive cars that for some reason are dotted about the place on small stages. They do not see anything wrong with it.

But no sane person ought to visit Westfield Stratford City and respond in this way. It ought to strike madness and terror into your very heart. At first it seems to offer a vision of the future. Not a positive future, but a sort of Blade Runner (in aesthetic terms), dystopian future where there is no government, only retail. The glowing shop signs, the teeming food courts, the ceilings, that cover all but do not seem to end (to spite the sky). They seem to say: “one day everything will be like this. This is how humanity is going to live, and then you won’t need to worry. We will replace all the lacking shopping experiences that came before with ones that are more like this.” Stratford International, one of the two stations flanking the complex, has a big empty hall (or it was empty when I walked through it) of a lobby that you can walk through, just like a normal hall at a normal train station… but there’s no echo. All the physical properties of it suggest that there should be an echo, but there isn’t one. I desperately look around me, searching for my shadow (luckily, I do spot it, or who knows how deeply and permanently the madness might have struck). For all I know, the shopping centre complex itself is like this as well (but its too busy to tell). I hope it is like this, but it doesn’t even matter whether or not it really is: Westfield Stratford City is the sort of place that eliminates echoes, or shadows, whether or not it actually does. The sort of place that alters the world to trim the unsightly elements of your shopping experience away.

But as one takes in the shops, it sinks in that this isn’t a demented vision of the future we’re experiencing, it’s a demented vision of the now. For all the echo-less detachment, this is really happening (or, has happened). And it is actually quite… luxurious. Or, it offers a small glimpse of an impression of luxury. There is an open-plan champagne bar. There is a real ale pub with its own microbrewery. There is a stall that only sells smoked salmon. There is an Indian sweet shop. It’s not just HMV in a bigger building near the Olympics, it actually does provide us with everything we could possibly want, and it is concrete, in the here and now.

But then there’s the skull. There is death, lurking behind all this. This £155 jumper in John Lewis rotting. This kindle reader just had a rat crawl out of it. The vintage sewing machines in All Saints are crawling with flies. And you can see it, in the building. Spotted from afar, what even is it? A formless mass. There is no way you can get a grip on any of it, just to look at it. The building defies any attempt to apply one’s conceptual capacities to it. Is it any recognisable shape? Does it ever look the same from one glance to another? Can we match the spatial properties of the inside to those of the outside? Of course we cannot.

And this is, of course, exactly why we should embrace Westfield Stratford City. Because we’re not meant to be able to grasp it. Or, maybe we are meant to, but if whoever was designing it knew what they were doing, we can’t have been meant to: we can’t, and it is fitting that we can’t. Because Westfield Stratford City is a cathedral to consumer capitalism. The real cathedrals (at their best) mystify with religious purpose. There is something holy and profound behind those Gothic arches, and we can look at it, but we can never quite grasp it. It defies precise expression.

But Westfield Stratford City seeks to mystify with the purpose of instilling in us a desire to shop. Now of course at its best, capitalism is a dynamic force that individuals can harness to some great benefit to themselves and the world. But consumer capitalism of the sort that Westfield Stratford City has been built in hymn to, puts itself beyond individuals, in the sense that it keeps us docile and powerless, except to uncritically desire the objects placed in front of us, and buy. What’s behind Westfield Stratford City is not God, but Mammon. And like the cathedrals tell us: “here is God,” by presenting us with a giant awe-inspiring building that informs us of the enormity of God’s presence in relation to you, Westfield Stratford City tells us: “here is consumer capitalism,” in this giant awe-inspiring building that informs us of the enormity of capitalism in relation to ourselves (which the building itself allegorises by being un-graspable). So when I say that there is death behind it, what I mean is: as we can only give ourselves to God (whether permanently or no) when impressed by one of the great cathedrals, thereby willing in a sense our deaths, when impressed by Westfield Stratford City, we can only give ourselves to Mammon, and we see our deaths in this as well (though there is no afterlife, only iPads).

Now, the reason why I think this means we ought to embrace Westfield Stratford City, and why I think it is such a great achievement, is because if there is anything that our civilization, in its present cultural moment, actually does (some great idea behind it), it is consumer capitalism. Now, consumer capitalism might be a dreadful idea. In fact, I’m inclined to say it is, which is why I think Westfield Stratford City is evil. But if we are going to be building monuments to anything, in any authentic way (that is not, for example, just an impression of a previous cultural moment’s monuments), then it has to be consumer capitalism. And we have built such a monument, in the form of Westfield Stratford City. And I think it bespeaks its success, as well as the ubiquity of the sort of consumer capitalism it celebrates, that, as I’ve said, everyone there seems perfectly at ease in it. And I hope that it remains forever in its present form, ossified even as the dynamic forces that operate in the world inevitably destroy this consumer world as they previously did Christendom, so that future generations will be as terrified and impressed by it as I am.