M&M's World - gaudy, soulless yet hugely popular

Tens of thousands flock each week to queue, buy overpriced sweets and take photos. But why, wonders Roisin Lanigan

- Roisin Lanigan

There is a dark force in the middle of Soho. Like an abyss, it swallows up light and repels hope. It corrupts all those who grow close, trapping them in its embrace. Its tiers wind in on themselves like an Escher artwork. At its hollow centre, a DayGlo spiral staircase twists upwards to look out across the wasteland that is Leicester Square. Dante thought hell had nine circles, but there is a place more terrifying than anything he imagined in the Divine Comedy, and it has four floors. I am talking, of course, about M&M’s World.

M&M’s World – a Minionified shop that sits on the corner of Leicester Square, curling back into Chinatown – has cemented itself as the empty heart of central London in its 13 years of existence. It appeared here in June 2011, taking over a site formerly occupied by the Swiss Centre. It is to this day the world’s largest candy store, clocking in at an impressive 35,000 square feet of pure, unadulterated M&M’s content. It’s one of a series of bizarre “universe” themed shopping locations imagined by the world-building execs at Mars, Incorporated – the first opened on the Las Vegas strip in 1997, followed by outposts in Florida, New York, Nevada, Shanghai, Minnesota and Berlin.

Created as part of Westminster City Council’s regeneration plan for the local area – conceived amid the rose-tinted haze of the London 2012 Olympics dream – M&M’s World was meant to make Leicester Square a “world-class destination”, akin to the remodelling of Times Square in New York that took it from a dangerous, forgotten and crime-heavy area in the 1980s to the mecca of consumerism and tourism that it is today.