Before a shopping centre selling past-season designer fashion at discounted prices opened its doors in April 1995, the site of Bicester Village had been “a wet field containing two old horses that looked ready for the knacker’s yard, and a fallen-down shed behind a small branch of Tesco”, remembers Colin Woodhead, a PR director who worked on the launch. “We might as well have been a Martian spaceship that had landed on that field.”
The timing of a retail concept then unknown in Britain was not auspicious. Three months later, the launch of an online bookseller called Amazon fired the starting pistol for a race toward internet shopping that would leave high streets half-empty and shopping centres boarded up.
