Chadstone Shopping Centre and retailing in Melbourne

Whether you're after a guinea pig, a special outfit or a family member who disappeared suddenly, Chadstone is the place to start looking.

Melbourne is made for the motor car, which means that it was also made for the cathedrals to consumerism that are shopping malls, with their easy parking facilities.  And the biggest of them all, the mother, father and grandparent of all the other malls in Australia, is Chadstone.

Uptown Chaddy

Known affectionately (or otherwise) as "Chaddy", Chadstone's vital statistics are impressive, even when compared with its American cousins.  The biggest shopping centre in Australia by far, if it were transplanted to the USA it would be the 15th biggest there, and expansion has been announced that would make it bigger than all but six American malls.  It already has 530 stores, more than any American site, and free parking for 9,500 cars.

I'm no adherent of modern consumerist culture but, for a Briton of my vintage, Chadstone is something of a wonder of the modern world.  Where I was brought up, a shopping mall was a fairly small and definitely seedy place.  Probably built in the 1970s, its interior would display an awful lot of concrete.  Perhaps there would be some central area that the planners had fondly thought would be a focal point, but which would in fact be used by the sorts of teenager whom your mother had warned you about, to get off with each other. If that was beyond them, they might seek apprenticeship with one or more of the derelicts, who gathered there because it was better than drinking in the rain.

Chadstone is nothing like this.  Quite apart from its sheer size, the customers who frequent the Gucci and Tiffany & Co outlets wouldn't stand for being panhandled by a semi-permanent feral population.  They do their shopping in a spacious, calming place, full of white and light, where tall palms grow towards a well-designed roof.  

It's not all Fifth Avenue.  Chadstone has things that people like me want to buy, but you have to leave the palms and piano players that embellish the high-rent zones behind.  The roof lowers and becomes opaque as you enter what I like to think of as the useful part, where they will cut your keys, and you can find a riot of delicatessens, greengrocers and cut-price kids' clothing stores.

You can see it from the moon, you know.  Probably.

If the wonder of Chadstone is its sheer size, it's also the best reason for not actually going there in the first place.  When added to a somewhat incongruous design, it's a very easy place in which to get lost.  
Even if you know where you are, whether or not you can remember where you parked your car is another question entirely.  For the uninitiated, the best advice is to locate a couple of the major stores and never to go anywhere where you're not confident of being able to find your way back to them.  Instead of teenagers and derelicts, if Chadstone has a semi-permanent population it's likely to be made up of straggling, pale-faced parents, looking for the shop where they agreed to meet their children last year.