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Few people travel to Cribbs Causeway without any intention of spending a penny there – but that is exactly what Gareth Rees did.

Gareth is a fan of car parks. He likes them so much he has written a 224-page book on the subject, Car Park Life.

A love letter to oft-overlooked urban landscapes, the newly released book features a spellbinding ode to Cribbs Causeway’s 7,000-space car park.

Gareth travelled almost 200 miles from his home in Hastings to sample the joys of the South Gloucestershire shopping complex, which dates back to 1976.

Bypassing the countless retail options, Gareth thoroughly enjoyed a day wandering around tarmac – and he has explained exactly why the experience was such an “exhilarating” one.

“The book is about re-imagining where we live, and how everything is interesting if you look closely,” he tells Bristol Live .

“The joy of the parking space was a new thing. The idea wasn’t to shop, but to go round like a tourist at a botanical garden.”

'Such a sense of mystery'

Before the trip, Gareth’s overriding memory of Bristol was being dumped there in the 1990s by his girlfriend, a traffic and travel presenter in the area – but this unhappy association did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for the visit.

He was particularly excited by the Cribbs Causeway website’s slogan: Experience the joy of 7,000 free parking spaces.

In the book, he describes this as “an offer [he] cannot refuse”, a slogan promising to fulfil his “deepest desires”.

He asks: “Does the joy come from parking free of charge, or from the knowledge that 7,000 parking spaces are freely available?

“Rarely can a shopping mall car park’s core mission statement have such a sense of mystery. Of poetry.”

Gareth writes his idea to visit to the car park without a car is “perverted”, adding: “Worse, I have no intention of spending any money at Cribbs Causeway.

“I won’t even sneak inside to buy a sandwich. It’s everything they don’t want. I’m an aberration, a freeloader taking the p***.”

'Hipster-free Bristol'

He caught a taxi to Cribbs from Bristol Parkway station, taking in the views of Bradley Stoke, Little Stoke and Patchway from the window.

“We’re far away from the trendy mural zones of Stokes Croft and Montpelier, where bohemians hang out in coffee houses and eat poppy seed muffins,” he notes.

“This is another Bristol. Commuter belt Bristol. Functional Bristol. Hipster-free Bristol.”

One of the first things he saw in the shopping complex was a standing stone in the middle of a roundabout, which brought to his mind the causeway’s history as a Roman route from Sea Mills to Gloucester.

“Out here on the Roman road, marking the entrance to the Mall, this faux-Neolithic standing stone sculpture suggests that we have progressed from the worship of the old gods into a brave new dawn of commerce, fossil fuel combustion and convenient parking,” he observes.

For Gareth, the stone highlights how the retail park is a logical progression from man first using tools.

He reveals he was “awestruck” by Cribbs’ “mad, multi-layered landscape”, the “Escher lithograph of parking”.

'Retail parks within retail parks'

“All you can see there is retail park,” Gareth tells us. “It’s retail parks within retail parks. Everything operates by its own logic.”

He writes in the book: “If the Mall is the main temple, where the most important retail priests reign, this is its attendant city.

“For this isn’t just one retail park, but a network of interconnected retail parks, like the boroughs of London.”

Gareth analyses the ethical jokes on billboards outside the Marks & Spencer’s food hall, one of which reads: “There’s nothing woolly about our commitment to animal welfare.”

Confused by the joke, he points out: “Most animals are not woolly. It only works if it refers to sheep.”

Around the corner of Marks & Spencer, Gareth found the official entrance to the Mall, or, in his words, “a huge block of square grey panels with a frontage of glass and steel, including two arched cantilevered glass canopies, one at the apex and another directly over the revolving hotel-style doors”.

He was “taken aback” by the traditional red postbox in this area, finding its “intimations of a British village weirdly incongruous”.

Gareth writes: “This is no relic of something that was here before, no remnant of a former community standing firm against the march of time; this location was, as they say, all fields.

“The postbox is a reassuring signifier of authenticity placed here as a psychological tactic more than for its utility.

“Even odder is the silver and pink Disney palace directly in front of the Mall, next to a Victorian carousel ringed by giant candy canes, plastic deer adorning the entrance, sullen parents with snot-faced toddlers queuing to go in.”

'Shabbier'

The author describes the Centaurus Retail Park as a “shabbier” place, which he compares to “a grainy photo from the 1980s”.

What seems to interest Gareth most of all is a feature he likens to Madonna’s famous cone bra.

“Rising from a busy roundabout is a massive grass-covered cone earthwork with a metallic nipple at its apex,” he writes.

“It dwarfs the dimensions of the menhir on the mini-roundabout I saw coming into the Mall

“The Cribbs Causeway Retail Park is an unknowable quantum object that transcends time, from the Neolithic standing stone to the 1980s shops to the cathedral mall to this futuristic beacon at the centre of it all.

“And this place is just one tiny piece of the globalised economic system, which is equally unknowable, beyond any single human’s control, yet which controls our daily lives, giving us food and clothing, heat and shelter.

“We have no choice but to live in it, and try our best to enjoy the 7,000 parking spaces, worship the religion of everlasting growth on a finite planet and bow down to this mysterious crypto-pyramid."

A powerful urge

Gareth ends the chapter with a breathless passage describing a powerful urge to climb the cone.

When we ask if he gave in to the temptation, he reveals he managed to resist.

Gareth adds he got a “weird buzz” out of his visit, telling us: “It’s no less interesting than a park.

“There is plenty of human detritus, quirky things to make you feel like it’s been there a while.”

Though Gareth admits he is “pessimistic and freaked out” by car parks’ role in climate change and consumerism, he also believes they show how the everyday can be magical.

When the author tells us he has two daughters, aged nine and 10, we ask if they share his love of car parks.

Laughing, he replies: “I did take them on a trip to car parks in Scotland, but they get normal holidays too.

“I think they prefer the more traditional ones. They’re not massively interested in me wandering about a car park.”

You can order Car Park Life here.

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