ABSTRACT
The cautious attitude adopted towards new suburban shopping schemes by professional planners in Britain arose in part because of the limited territorial size of the country and the need to contain urban sprawl whenever possible but also because of the visible scars that resulted from an excess of decentralisation over earlier periods of time in North Amercia and continental Europe. In particular, the serious decline in trade of major American downtown areas by outlying regional shopping centres made a deep impression, largely accounting for the total ban that seemed to be placed over these developments in Britain during the next 15 years. There were mitigating circumstances within the United States itself, of course, that explain their greater acceptability there, including the higher rates of car ownership, more profligate suburbanisation of the population and the social divides between the black and white communities; but it nevertheless remains astonishing that new centres were still being built throughout the 1970s at the rate of about a thousand per year.1 The continued proliferation has finally met with pockets of resistance, however, some of it engendered by local politicians and pressure groups concerned about the environmental impact of large schemes on small town centres and the depletion of tax revenues, some of it stoked by state and federal government officials alarmed at the drain of energy resources.
