Leaving Bluewater, it struck me how differently its story and that of the town emerging around might have been. In Crawley in 2004, a trio of middle-class British Asians took up the Islamist cause, with plans to blow up Bluewater and the “slags” at the Ministry of Sound in London. Had this happened it’s doubtful that Ebbsfleet would have risen from the dust, blood and ashes. Yet it wasn’t only potential terrorists who saw Bluewater as the epitome of western decadence. “Many of us share the Crawley terrorists’ dislike of Bluewater,” wrote Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett. “But that is not to say we have any interest in their plans to improve it.” In the London Review of Books, Ian Sinclair wrote that visitors to Bluewater “wander… under the soft cosh of muzak, feeling the life-force drain. These are the retail undead.”