Like all great civilisations, from Ancient Greece to the British Empire, decadence heralds the end. The fabric of a society dissolves as its common vision disintegrates. After several hundred glorious space-age years as the world’s leading city of the future, Bracknell has fallen. The prevalence of nuclear powered moon scooters as the only viable means of transport; the grey, stately boulevards of nameless cafes and charity shops flanked by magnificent, faceless monolithic tower blocks; the glorious overhead concrete walkways; the August plastic Christmas tree and robot reindeer; the alfresco dining off of the top of rubbish bins. Yes, all these are gone with the onslaught of agruably the most brutal cultural revolution ever witnessed. All this history, so treasured by its residents for so long, is to be swept aside by "The Lexicon, Bracknell”. Like its pathetically and equally meaninglessly named partner "The Oracle, Reading” this will purportedly provide Bracknellovians with “town centre life as it should be.” In reality, it will provide the poor residents with a lowest-common-denominator, couldn’t-possibly-be-dumbed-down-any-further environment, i.e. a replica of every single town centre in the UK. This soul-killing disease, now infecting all the UK’s town centres has finally claimed its greatest prize and, like the fall of Roman Britain, has plunged the entire country into a new Dark Age in which ideas and the pursuit of original thinking are swept aside and even persecuted. Now Bracknell has fallen we have all silently succumbed to a corporate nightmare, controlled by investors who all live somewhere else. Like our town centres, our individual originality has being eroded away almost completely. Our environment is demanding that we become clones who watch what we are told to see, listen to what we are told to hear, go where we are told to go and be what we are told to be. The Bracknellian resident, once a subversive and endlessly creative individual clad in charity shop gear, cruising on his/her nuclear powered moon scooter along the concrete highways of the space-age town centre in a belted trouser suit will be no more. Bracknellians will now dress in the uniform dictated by Top Shop, Primark, Dorothy Perkins and Burtons. They will read celebrity biographies bought from Sainsbury's and shuffle about "The Lexicon, Bracknell" from McDonald’s to Burger King while footling with and staring at their iPhone. They will sit on the bolted-to-the-floor fast-food furniture discussing mindless television programmes Premiership football and the fortunes of celebrities they will never meet and whose lives will never have anything to do with their own. Bracknell is gone. The once proud space-age concrete cold war city of the future is no more. It has been obliterated by a cancer of colourful and vacuous cloning. Bracknell and all it stood for is dead and, with it, in a way, so are we: yes, every one of us.
One of the many brainwashing signs distributed around Bracknell's ruined town centre by Bracknell PLC's Mind Control Department.
The lie. This is the "vision" of the new Lexicon, Bracknell. It's "a place to shop, a place to meet and a place to breather the air", apparently without any shops in the middle of a field.
