30 years of Bicester How a wet field in Oxfordshire defied the death of the shopping centre

30 years of Bicester

- Jess Cartner-Morley

Before a shopping mall selling past-season designer fashion at discounted prices opened in April 1995, the site of Bicester Village had been "a wet field containing two old horses that looked ready for the knackers' yard, and a fallen-down shed behind a small branch of Tesco", said the PR director Colin Woodhead, who worked on the launch. "We might as well have been a Martian spaceship that landed on that field."

The timing of a retail concept then unknown in Britain was not auspicious. Three years later, the launch of an online bookseller called Amazon fired the starting pistol for a race towards online shopping that would leave high streets half empty and shopping centres boarded up.

But Bicester Village has defied the downward trend of bricks-and-mortar retail to celebrate its 30th anniversary at almost 100% occupancy, and with a waiting list for pop-up spaces. Last year there were almost 7 million visitors. It generates among the highest sales per square metre of any mall in the world, and boasts the world's only cut-price Dior store and its biggest Pret a Manger. The Oxfordshire mall is now part of a global empire that includes two outposts in China - Bicester Village Shanghai and Bicester Village Suzhou.