The Death of Bracknell

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.

The tragic reality finally revealed: the promise of nothing less than a clone of every single other town centre in the UK.

Zardoz The Great

In addition to the town council, Bracknell is ruled by a mysterious alien force known as Zardoz The Great, or so Bracknellian lore has it. To the horror of the town council, on the day the Bracknell town centre "Regeneration" was announced, the sky went mental (see picture attached) and a huge booming voice was heard everywhere, just like on that episode of Star Trek, or it could have been Space 1999. Nobody could tell if the voice was just in their heads but it seemed to be roaring something about "betrayal" and "Bar Torino and the Bus Station Café not good enough for you then, eh?" Under the town centre Regeneration programme, both these establishments have been scheduled for demolition and will be replaced by Starbucks or Costa or something. In any event, upon encountering the resulting wrath of Zardoz The Great, the Bracknellians all raced their moon scooters for cover into Bar Torino and the Bus Station Café and nobody has been seen outside since.

The Market

This is Bracknell's "The Market": easily the grandest and most ambitious structure ever created by mankind. It's so big, you can't fit it into one picture; or even two pictures. The image below represents about 13% of the total surface area of the front wall. 

Ever mindful of its commitment to space age technology, Bracknell's town council installed huge gravity modulating machines next to the front doors, shifting the gravitational force inside the building through 90 degrees such that the outside wall you are looking at now became the ceiling. Once powered, the inside of The Market became, instantly and literally, the largest vertical market in the world. Within hours of opening, the back wall, i.e. the floor, became a bustling, air conditioned shoppers' paradise several hundreds of acres in size: a bustling hive of constantly eating customers humming about on moon scooters, fast food, weapon dogs, designer labels and electronic gadgets. Within a year of opening, The Market won the CBI's award for the best venue for consumers to wander about aimlessly trying to find something to buy a bit newer and more "awesome" than the same sort of thing they and their friends already have but which will certainly be superseded within a few months by another thing nearly the same but a bit newer and more "awesome".

Sadly, having served the Bracknellian community loyally for almost 50 trouble-free years, The Market is due to be demolished. A terrible disaster resulting from a power cut caused the gravity modulators to fail and approximately 2,000 moon scooters fell hundreds of feet into an enormous stack of broken wheels, handlebars, nuclear power units, half eaten burgers, horrifically hot apple turnovers, electronic gadgets and flaccid, jelly like corpses. It took International Rescue at least two episodes of Thunderbirds to clear the mess. There are, as yet, no plans to rebuild The Market. 

Perpetual Christmas

Bracknell's authorities are always keen to give the city's residents more of a good thing; and who doesn't love Christmas?! For this reason, the Bracknell General Assembly has declared a permanent state of  festivity. That's right: in Bracknell, every day is Christmas day, 365 days a year, every year. As a consequence, Bracknell is one of the only places in the Northern Hemisphere where parched shoppers can take shelter from the raging, blistering sunshine in the shade of a massive, 60 foot, sparkling, plastic Christmas tree complete with life size nativity scene.

New Rules For Pedestrians

In order to prevent further injuries to pedestrians, from the 1st of August, no walking will be permitted in Bracknell. Despite initiatives including free tokens entitling everyone to their first hour free on a nuclear powered moon scooter and/or a 50% discount on the purchase of the same, some less well educated residents have insisted on continuing to walk about the town's shopping centre and pavements. In a statement yesterday Bracknell Councillor Martin Landau said "The complete chaos resulting from the frankly primitive behaviour of these stubborn pedestrians means, regrettably, that radical action from the authorities is now necessary. From the beginning of August, walking will be allowed only in private homes and then only until stair lifts have been installed, which will be compulsory by the beginning of August next year."

Endless Summer

For the residents of Bracknell, the balmy July days stretch out into the seemingly endless tapestry of the Bracknellovian summer.

Photogenic Bracknell

Some cities just have it: that certain something. Bracknell is one of these. Like the works of a great composer whose style is instantly recognisable, each view of Bracknell is distinct and yet unmistakably Bracknellian. This is Bracknell's bus station café, the place that Edward Hopper came for inspiration just prior to committing "Nighthawks At The Diner" to canvas. Hopper's painting, however, fails to capture the sophistication of the Bracknellian environment. Bracknell's authorities have thought of everything: from the featureless expanse of tarmac outside to the out-of-order disabled toilets, nothing is left to chance at the anonymous café.

Robot Reindeer

As a city of the future, today, Bracknell is always ahead of other towns in Britain and this is particularly true of Bracknell's Christmas decorations. So proud is the town of its unique way of celebrating Jesus's birth, that it begins to do so in mid November. From about this time, the town council unleashes its famous robot deer, which, as can be seen in the picture, dash, dance, prance and vixen all over the shopping centre. Their ambitious designer, anxious to make his mark, fitted them with anti-gravity hooves allowing them to climb walls and spring from car park level to elevated walk way like demented and very large, metal squirrels. By the first of December the Bracknellians are understandably irritated by these clanking deer-like automata. This explains the second part of the season's town centre festivities which involves gangs of dangerous dog owning residents pursuing the reindeer until the latter's batteries run out on or around Christmas day. The robot deer are then unceremoniously dismembered and dumped outside the council offices. Don't worry, they'll be back again in time for next year's celebrations.

Flying Hovercars

The use of the nuclear powered moon scooter as the chief method of getting about in Bracknell is well known but it could so easily have been different. This prototype flying hovercar was one of the most hotly anticipated items ever to be featured in the Bracknell Forest Standard. Disappointingly, like so many other seemingly ace ideas including the Sinclair C5, the flying hovercar was critically flawed. Keen to reduce the weight of the thing in order to enable flight, the designers decided to omit any fuel storage, preferring to rely on mains power. This meant that upon take off, the range of the flying hovercar was limited, in the case of the pictured prototype, to the 36 inch length of the flex between the craft and the mains socket.

Bracknell's Unique Festivals

As residents of a unique and forward thinking community, Bracknellians enjoy a number of seasonal events that are, sadly, absent from the calendars of most other towns and cities. Unlike the rest of Britain, Bracknell has not embraced Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving or Independence Day, preferring rather bizarrely not to pretend to American. Bracknell's traditional and unique events include: Walking Afternoon, when huge numbers of Bracknellians struggle from their nuclear powered moon scooters and enjoy as briefly as possible the novelty of getting about without assistance; and Dangerous Dog Week (unusual in that it is celebrated every week for 52 weeks per year), during which the owners of these canine maiming machines congregate in the town centre at Bar Torino to smoke and stare at passers by. This picture shows Bracknell's annual Festival of Polythene in full swing. For reasons unexplained, in addition to the wrapping of the entire town centre in plastic sheeting, this most enduring of festivals also involves the decapitation of every tree in the vicinity.

Links with Ancient Culture

The origin and nature of this extraordinary object in the shopping centre is the subject of energetic debate among Bracknellovians. Some believe "Cube Henge" or "Henge Squirt" to be a gift from Bracknell's twin town, Moonbase Alpha out of Space 1999. More eccentric residents believe it to be as old as the shopping centre itself. In any case, evidence including the concrete chunk's proximity to lay lines and relative position to other concrete chunks in the vicinity suggest that it may have been used by the ancients to tell when the shops open on a Saturday. The latter theory is supported by the recent discovery of objects made out of precisely the same concretey stuff in Basingstoke, another city of the future with a shopping centre. Local historian Burt Reynolds claims that as Cube Henge is too big to get into a Ford Escort, even one with a sun roof, a group of Bracknellovians must have transported the concrete mass on rolling logs, pulling the back one out and sticking it to the front again, you know, like that. Mr Reynolds is certain that the difficulty and danger involved in such a task would have resulted in several deaths, especially as those involved must have been absolutely shit-faced on a Saturday night to even think of trying it.

Retail Marketing

Long before electronic tele-shopping and shops with catalogues in the front and all the stuff hidden away at the back, Bracknell's retail outlets were marketing and selling ranges of things that, even now, Amazon and Argos can only dream about uncomfortably. Incredibly, these eye-watering images were taken of a single shop window in Bracknell's shopping centre. This shop may be small but it succeeds handsomely in supplying everything the space age shopper could reasonably want. Yes, whether it's Zippo lighters and Ronsonol lighter fluid you need; or perhaps some toilet paper and a Chelsea Football Club leather wallet, cuff links and key ring gift set; or may be some empty boxes that used to have things in and hookah pipe charcoal; or even a "Forever United" cigarette tin and a range of language learning DVDs (including Dutch, Bengali and Hungarian); this shop has it all.
Just as with everything else, Bracknell leads the way in retail.

Motoring in the Future

Bracknell's residents are committed to the future and sustainability but, for reasons nobody really understands, they drive everywhere in gargantuan four wheel drive machines designed for jungle warfare or the lower slopes of Icelandic volcanoes. Such vehicles are therefore unsuited for urban roads and car parks but this doesn't matter to the driver. It isn't clear whether Bracknell's love affair with the nuclear powered moon scooter came before its obsession with armoured personnel carriers. One popular theory is that the increase in the number of pedestrians and cyclists suffering from collisions with the absurd vehicles caused them to use moon scooters while recovering from injury and they never went back to their original means of perambulation. The other theory is that the feeling of invulnerability enjoyed by drivers meant that having descended the steps, onto the running board of their bloated vehicle and then down to planet Earth with the rest of us, they were simply unable to cope with the fear caused by the absence of artificial elevation and reinforced steel plus airbags. In any event, here are a few pictures of the sort of psychopathic behaviour that driving one of these monsters can cause in otherwise well adjusted human beings: in this case, parking as inconveniently for everyone as possible.

"Retro" Architecture

Just like the famous concrete cows of Milton Keynes, almost everything in the future will be pretend and designed to look like things used to before everything became a bit rubbish, really.  As you'd expect, Bracknell is a pioneer in this field. Visitors to this shopping centre in the middle of the city of the future will be amazed to learn that, despite being directly beneath one of the most medium-sized shopping centre roof structures in Berkshire, the escalators and the upper floor are entirely for show. Reliance on nuclear powered moon scooters means that Bracknellians are subject to the same limitations as daleks when getting about and so escalators are redundant. As a consequence, although Bracknell's residents have long since abandoned walking as a means of travel, for nostalgic reasons they like to be reminded of what it was like to do stuff that past generations enjoyed: to stand two abreast on escalators blocking people who want to walk on them; to throw litter from the upper floor on to passers-by below; and, to have to walk half way round the centre trying to work out how to get from one floor to another because of the deliberate misalignment of the escalators.

City of Tolerance

Two veteran Bracknellians exchange views having seen the shockingly primitive behaviour of the walker to their right. Younger Bracknellians tend to find walking amusing or endearing but, as is evident from their faces pictured here, older residents regard those who eschew the nuclear powered moon scooter with suspicion.

Space Age Shopping

In the future, almost all shopping will be virtual and Bracknell has embraced this inevitability with conviction.

Large areas of Bracknell's shopping centre are thus reserved for shops like these which act as blank canvases, allowing shoppers equipped with special goggles to browse their imagined shopping destinations of choice. 

Religion in the Future

Bracknell's religious community has a very progressive approach to retaining its membership. As a result, Bracknell is the envy of the rest of Britain with weekly church attendance remaining remarkably consistent since the introduction of the current strategy.

Bracknell in Bloom

Following the resounding success of last year's inaugural "Bracknell In Bloom" campaign, Bracknell Council has thrown its full weight behind this year's entry into the Royal county of Berkshire's initiative. The result: residents flock to enjoy another sun-soaked shopping frenzy among the flowers in the boulevards of Bracknell.

Getting About in the City of The Future

This Bracknell resident sips coffee as he cruises about in his nuclear powered moon-scooter from pound shop to charity shop. He is shielded from the searing heat by a thin cling-film-like membrane that allows him to remain at a steady 74 degrees Fahrenheit (that's about 22 centi-Euro-litres per kilojoule), which is proven to be the perfect temperature for maintaining an acute sense of paranoia.

Transport and Café Culture

In Bracknell, city of the future, walking is a thing of the past. Residents prefer to get around the extensive shoppers' paradise by means of nuclear powered moon-scooters. This scene shows Bracknell's most sophisticated, affluent residents enjoying the continental piazza culture of the Royal county of Berkshire's most precious jewel: Bar Torino at the boulevards of Bracknell.