Sea Of Sameness

As an outsider briefly passing through an unfamiliar English town, this column's author was horrified to find that the town was really not so unfamiliar. In fact, it shared characteristics with nearly half of England's towns. Those characteristics -- from a rash of mini-malls to an overabundance of chain-stores and fast food restaurants that had swallowed up all local business -- are the downfall of English towns, according to the author.

"Consumers shuffled miserably from one homogeneous retail outlet to another, as if directed by some unseen higher power to have the latest jeans, mobile-phone handsets, computer game consoles and sportswear. Clutching my limp pasty, I joined the solemn procession, only to find that I was hopelessly lost in the trackless corporate wasteland of a town with nothing to distinguish it from any other."

"This is 'clone-town Britain' - where, according to a little-noticed report of this name released by the New Economics Foundation in June last year, a full 42 per cent of our population centres are already fully converted clones, with a further 26 per cent threatened by the march of sameness. The report says: 'A generation grew up in the 1970s and 1980s with the spectre of dreary state-centrally planned east European economies. Now that generation is waking up to realise they've been replaced by equally dreary economies, centrally planned by corporations.' "