THE biggest glasshouse in Britain, complete with a small Australasian forest is being billed as the largest complex of its kind in Europe. Situated under 50-metre cliffs in an old chalk quarry, surrounded by seven lakes and 13,000 carparking spaces, 320 stores, umpteen restaurants and leisure villages, it will take shopping into the realms of the surreal.
Developers have hailed the £350 million retail extravaganza, just a mile from the M25 at Dartford, as the start of something much grander - the birth of a large township of the south-east to compete with the booming M4 corridor.
"Call it a linear city of the future if you like," beamed Eric Kuhne, the US architect behind Bluewater, as he attempted to redefine the concept of an out-of-town shopping complex, which is far from universally popular. "We want to take all the ideas that Bluewater represents and roll them through to residential, leisure, offices, industry . . . we call it Bluewater Valley."
He talks of a third way, between city and suburbs, to relieve pressure on Greater London, with the new community built around the 240-acre shopping complex and extending to a further 2,000 acres, mainly in old quarries.
With 7,000 houses planned eastwards in an adjoining quarry - and a string of other projects in the pipeline near the proposed channel tunnel rail link station - Kent county council talks confidently of an emerging linear city, envisaging up to 30,000 houses and a population approaching 70,000 early next century.
Eric Kuhne accepts that Bluewater, approved after a public inquiry 10 years ago and developed by the Australian property group Lend Lease Corporation, would not get government approval today. It breaks new planning guidelines which prohibit out-of-town shopping centres, 10 of which have been built from Gateshead to Sheffield, and at Lakeside a couple of miles across the Thames from Dartford.
"This is the last in the line and it comes along in the nick of time," he accepts. "Don't call it just a shopping centre, it's more of a leisure and recreational city with lots of people who don't want to shop."
Triangular, with a silver roof topped with domes replicating large Kentish coast houses, it features three 180-metre long marble shopping malls. Three large "anchor" stores, Marks & Spencer, John Lewis and the House of Fraser, have been built at the points of the triangle. Shoppers will be greeted in hotel-style reception areas, where they will be offered the delights of Bluewater's lakes, boating, rambling, cycle paths and 50 acres of gardens.
It will take 40 minutes to walk through the malls, where designers have been at pains to recreate the high street - Guildhall, the Rose Garden and Thames Walk - and have even inscribed Shakespearean sonnets on the walls. Artists and sculptors have produced 50 pieces of original art, including individual sculptures of each of the craftsmen from medieval guilds.
But with an estimated 80,000 visitors a day, fears are growing that the influx of traffic at Junction 2 of the M25 will cause severe disruption to an already grossly overcrowded motorway.
The Highways Agency is clearly concerned, and warns that at peak periods it might have to close routes to Bluewater. Because the centre will open at 10 am, and close at 9 or 10 pm for most of the week, the agency is banking on shoppers arriving outside peak time.
Environmental groups are unhappy. According to the Council for the Protection of Rural England, which strongly opposed Bluewater at the public inquiry, "the spread of this kind of development in areas like this simply fuels congestion and ruins our quality of life".
