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.