Welcome to Hell

There isn't much to do on Monday's. The Boomtown Rats didn't just write a song about Monday's for nothing, nobody likes them. It's a shame then that Monday quite often happens to be my day-off.


So in my pursuit of something to do, I'll usually end up going for a wander around the City Centre, a local park or shopping centre.
But today I got the urge for adventure and decided to go slightly further and head to Sheffield and the Meadowhall Shopping Centre. That was mistake number one.

There's a good reason why Sheffield's gargantuan shopping mall is dubbed 'MeadowHell', but the fact remains that not even the devil himself could devise a method of torture so intense. Having said that, some of my family do live in Sheffield so I really should have known better.

Getting there is a pain in itself. The M1 southbound usually gets busy as you approach Sheffield and always has done, but attempting to turn off at Junction 34 is a battle even Goliath would shy away from. Firstly, J34 has a whole lane dedicated to it. That creates the problem of people from the outside trying to pull to the left whilst at the same time, HGV's try to pull out from the left to the centre lane. Obviously, it's every man for himself, so nobody is prepared to give an inch as they eye a prized space in the left-hand lane.

Having eventually left the M1, I then tried to negotiate the myriad of car parks and traffic management systems that lead you in and around the centre. Sheer luck found me a space to park and I was on my way in to the "Land of Shopportunity", or so the sign above the door told me.

The first thing that hits you about these sorts of places is that they appear to be made entirely for the benefit of retail moguls such as Philip Green, DSG and John Cauldwell. All you see are the high-street chains that over recent years have completely saturated the retail market and left consumers with little or no choice when it comes to 'shopping around' (see the trouble I had trying to buy a PC earlier this month). Phones4U and Carphone Warehouse have at least two separate units in the centre, Republic have two and the number of units belonging to Phil Green (owner of Topman, Burton, Dorothy Perkins and others as part of his Arcadia Group) must be heading towards double figures.

Having spend an hour or so and about £40, it became apparent how people don't seem to realise what little choice we have. I'm all for sucessful businesses, but I at least like to see competition having possitve impacts on product quality and price.

Meadowhell does have 'The Lanes' which is a small corner of the store dedicated to smaller independent stores and some of the products on offer were things you would never expect to find on the high street. A proper music store for one, shop dedicated to Formula 1 memorabillia and a hardware shop that was staffed by someone who looked like he'd know what he was talking about, rather than the 17-year-olds you get in B&Q who'd struggle to wire a 13amp plug.
A walk down here is very refreshing and makes my somewhat happy that Leeds hasn't gone down the 'out-of-town shopping centre' route like cities such as Sheffield, Newcastle and to a lesser extent Manchester, instead prefering to harness the attractions of the City Centre. We do have the White Rose Centre, but that's akin to a large supermarket and not much else.

Leaving wasn't so much a problem. Meadowhall's one saving grace (apart from 'The Lanes') is that it's next to the M1, making for a speedy getaway.