Fare Thee Well, Pentagon Center

My first true mall was the Stoneborough Center in Maidstone, Kent, prior to which I knew the mall only as a place where American teenagers would hang out in movies starring Michael J. Fox. I grew up in the era of the shopping precinct. By the time I went to art college, the era of the mall had arrived. The Stoneborough center had a great record shop called Challenger & Hicks from which I purchased debut albums by the Dentists and the Apostles, amongst others; and Hayley worked at Miss Selfridge on the lower floor. I had entered Hayley one evening, a transaction facilitated by booze and Hayley's desire to annoy Pete, her boyfriend, but it ended badly. This left me mooning around outside Miss Selfridge trying to make it seem as though I just happened to be passing, until she emerged, took me to McDonalds, and explained the general concept of dumpsville - which was probably fair enough with hindsight.

That's all I can remember of the Stoneborough Center.

My second mall was the Pentagon Center in Chatham, Kent. I moved to Chatham in September, 1987 and lived there for the next two years. The Pentagon Center was bigger and Chatham had better pubs and I knew more people. My memories of the Pentagon Center are as follows:

• Andy Bibby shoplifting my Christmas present from WHSmith, the Monkees greatest hits on cassette. He presented me with this gift directly outside the Pentagon Center on the pedestrian walkway. I wasn't actually expecting a Christmas present from him because I didn't like him very much, and was never particularly struck on the Monkees either for that matter.
• Buying cheap records from a store on the ground floor. The shop seemed to be one big bargain bin of ex-chart releases and things which hadn't sold in the first place. Being on the dole and hence skint at the time, I picked up quite a lot there and even got into the habit of buying 7" singles seeing as they were something like twenty-five pence each. I'd only really bothered with albums and 12" singles up until that point for slightly cranky, pedantic reasons; but at twenty-five pence a throw, I felt adventurous and took chances on things I'd never heard if they seemed interesting. Inevitably I picked up a few duds, but also some pretty good stuff - Eric B & Rakim, early techno singles by Todd Terry and the like.
• Buying normally priced records from K2, the other record store, which I think was on the second floor. They had a couple of things on the Illuminated label, which was nice, and the first Lack of Knowledge album. I also encountered my first Metallica album in their racks. I hadn't heard of them before, and thirty years later I'm still astonished at what a pitiful name they chose - Metallica because they play metal, and so it presumably suggests things which pertain to the same. It struck me as being like a punk band calling themselves the Gobbing Pogoers or Punkerrific!
• Running into the French chef from the Blue Lagoon just outside one afternoon and him getting very excited and waving a newspaper at me, folded to the classified section at the back. The prison service was recruiting. He knew I was on the dole and somehow thought I'd make a great prison warden. He might have been Spanish, come to think of it.
• The Blue Grotto, which was a depressing pub on the lower floor as you made your way out to where the National Express coaches were parked, and tellingly possibly the nearest pub to the dole office as the crow flies - although it might have been Churchill's, I suppose. It felt like one of those modern pubs on a fifties estate, all stains, man-made fibre and broken dreams. I'm not sure I ever went in there, or if I did, I didn't stay very long. Its claim to fame seems to have been as venue for the Dentists' first gig.
• Ludicrously animatronic festive displays around Christmas near the escalators, although this is one of those memories where I can no longer quite remember if it was from life or something on TV.
• Pilgrimage to the associated coach station every other Friday afternoon - either every two weeks or possibly monthly - for transport up to London so as to stock up on X-Men comics and visit my friend Carl in Rotherhithe. This coach journey is probably what imprinted me with the idea of living in Lewisham, which I eventually did. The most memorable part of the route was through Lewisham, you see.

That's more or less the sum of my memories of the Pentagon Centre, although there's also the possibility that I may have bought a Talking Heads album from WHSmith, probably Speaking in Tongues. They're not great memories, and you'd be hard pressed to get a three hour feature film out of them, but they're my memories.

Recently I've learned that the Pentagon Center is to be redeveloped. Online articles seem keen to stress that it's a redevelopment rather than demolition, but the first image that comes up shows a JCB, rubble, and hoarding promising 1 & 2 bedroom apartments from ₤185,000. I'm not sure I've set foot in the place this century, never mind recently, and I don't doubt the truth of online articles bemoaning it having turned into a piss-stained urban purgatory of pound shops and loan sharks; but then it was always kind of crappy, even in my day, and it felt like our crappy. I don't have any real investment in the place, not after all this time, and arguably even less right to object to the coffee crash pads and mindfulness hubs which I'm sure will soon be setting up shop in whatever's left once they've housed all those web developers from Leicester who've heard something or other about at least one of the local schools; but I thought I should at least acknowledge the passing of whatever it is that's passing.

Some things were better when they were crap.