Diamond encrusted crocs? Bedazzled bullet blenders? Cheshire Oaks has you covered

We’re all shuffling in formation. A slow, silent procession circling a vast, gleaming central altar of PCP family saloons. A few rebels attempt to swim against the tide, but they are quickly absorbed back into the current.

It’s a warm and sunny summer afternoon. We are surrounded by untold riches. Silks from China, gems from Sri Lanka, Argentinian leather and French perfumes. Everyone is miserable. 

This is in Cheshire Oaks, the Uncanny Valley of shopping malls. Thirty years ago, the Ellesmere Port outlet village opened with an almost quaint array of just 24 stores. Back in 1995, it was strictly a clearance bin strip mall. Today it’s morphed into a 400,000 square foot goliath complete with 165 shops, dozens of restaurants, roaring dinosaurs presiding over a crazy golf course, street food trucks and spinning fairground rides. A fever dream with cut price Crocs. The ‘village’ is all tastefully designed slate-roofed rows of shops squished together, like the glass pots of some high-end spice rack, lined up on a kitchen worktop. Little breakout spaces with topiary bushes and benches encourage us to linger. Not that anyone has time for that.

In Sunglass Hut, the finest Austrian crystals cascade around the rim of a pair of Swarovski sunglasses, scattering the light into a constellation of mini rainbows that dance across the viewing mirror. It’s quite beautiful. But it’s a display that goes unnoticed in the scramble for a bargain. Hungry hands pore over designer frames, over-heated customers barge through. 

“Excuse me,” snaps a customer, as she tries to free a pair of gold frame Guccis from their temporary entanglement with her Mulberry headscarf. "What's the snow rating of these?”

“Umm, I’m not sure, let me check,” mutters a tired-looking sales assistant. 

I catch the price tag. The irritable tourist is holding a bona fide bargain in her hands — a steal at £350, down from £470. The slopes of Val d'Issere will be all the paler this season, should the sales assistant not furnish her with the valuable intel. And quickly, please. As Krissy turns to leave, the woman’s aggressively tanned partner adds: “They always state the snow rating in Dubai.” That must come in handy in the Emirates, I think.

The man’s neck is caged in a tangle of chunky, chainlink necklaces. Their gunmetal sheen frames his face like an abandoned sirloin on a disposable barbeque. He’s trying on a pair of Michael Kors – a snip at £170 – and looking quite pleased with himself, if the slight pucker of his dewy lips into his phone camera is anything to go by. I can almost sense the flicking on of a filter, and the release of an Insta reel, sent forth into the world. Looking Gooood. Bicep emoji. 

Behind me, a man whose body looks like dough proving under an Emporio Armani athleisure cloche, is chastising his son. “Noah, think it through dude,” the man – let’s call him Bromborough Man – says, snatching a pair of overpriced Oakleys from his hand. “How are you going to play padel in those?”

There are special, ugly words for places like this – words like Retailtainment, and Phygital. Cheshire Oaks as the Frankenstein’s Monster of malls, attempting to take on the rise of online shopping with lots of physical fun: shopping as a leisure activity. Consuming as a by-product of a leisurely amble through a cobblestone village square, complete with the added frisson of a million miniscule variations of a polo neck. Who needs the hills of Snowdonia, or the beaches of Formby, when a family summer’s day out can be this much fun?

Whatever it’s doing, it appears to be working. Last year Cheshire Oaks said it attracted eight million shoppers, a figure owners McArthurGlen remind us is equivalent to “the population of New York.”

Quite what the actual population of New York would make of this, the first and largest designer outlet in Europe, we'll never know, because New Yorkers don’t often choose to holiday in a car park surrounded by last season’s unwanted crap. 

Instead, Cheshire Oaks markets itself to visitors from China, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, who spend up to seven times that of us locals, who usually just come here to bicker and buy a mini Le Creuset ramekin we didn’t need and will never use. 

Today, the visitors are a fifty-fifty split of international tourists and regional day trippers. In the Diesel shop, I’m surrounded by a gang of beefy thirty-something men in judiciously-ripped jeans and leather jackets, jockeying for position in front of the mirror, trying on ever-more excessively-embroidered sweatshirts. 

“Can I help you?” a sales assistant asks me. “No, thanks,” I say. “I”m just looking.” 

I don’t elaborate. I don’t say what I’m really doing is looking around the merch and wondering – when did Diesel pivot to appeal solely to Belorussian gym owners?

In Cheshire Oaks the outlets feel like simulcrums of the real thing. Not quite Next, more like Next door. Less Birkenstock, more Birkenhead. Cover versions of your favourite brands that, if you squint, you could almost believe are the same as their high street versions.  But, just to prove they’re not, and that you’re a cheapskate, they’ll give you a shitty paper bag that’s not quite as stylish as the one you’d get in their store in Liverpool ONE. Just so you can give it to your friend and pretend you spent top dollar on their birthday present. That’s the Cheshire Oaks deal. 

If only it stopped at the bag. Plenty of major Cheshire Oaks brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Coach, North Face and Hugo Boss have admitted to creating "made for outlet" lines with cheaper materials, simpler construction, or fewer features. 

In Calvin Klein an entire family has decided that peach is going to be their leitmotif this season. Dad and son are holding up peach shorts to their crotches, while daughter and mum are not quite so sure.

“I’d never have thought of peach,” Dad says.

There’s a reason for that, Dad, I sense his son is thinking. 

“These are a bit like the ones they had in Regent Street,” the daughter says, holding up a peach bikini. “What do you think? For Tiana’s hen party?”

“Hmmmmm,” her mum says, dubiously fingering the fabric, “feels very flimsy to me.”

That seems to clinch it, and the daughter takes them to the checkout. Dad and son are still checking out each others’ peachy crotches, waiting for a seal of approval from anyone. 

In between the brands you know, Cheshire Oaks cleverly fills in the gaps with a whole array of brands that you think you’ve heard of but you’re not quite sure, and you’re too afraid to ask, lest it look like that hapless assistant in The Devil Wears Prada: brands with names that to my ears sound like Coochy-Coo, Paparazzi and Jizz Queen. Maybe they’re the kids’ new favourite, maybe they’ve been hallucinated into being by AI. Who can tell? 

There’s a serious branch of cosmology that suggests we’re all part of a huge simulation – that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer game created by a more sophisticated intelligence. 

If it were true, though – so the theory goes – there may well be clues. If you know where to look, you’ll spot little glitches in the Matrix. Cheshire Oaks is one, I think.

I walk briskly down one of its avenues and if I look straight ahead it all feels real, like I’m chasing bad guys down the streets of some Eastern European city in a PS2 game. But if I stop and swivel my head around really quickly I notice the lag. It’s tiny, but it’s there. A nanosecond later, those animated characters will start browsing, the pixellated window displays will turn into 3D boots and handbags, and a man will start throwing knives at a magnetic knife block in ProCook.

I slam the brakes on outside Paul Smith and head inside, mostly to escape the sickly sweet smell that’s catching in the back of my throat. I can’t quite work it out. It’s earthy and savoury, repugnant yet sugary. 

“Yeah, it’s worse on hot days,” a sales assistant tells me, “it turns your stomach,” she says, smoothing over a rumpled display of tee shirts. “It just hangs over the entire place". The sales assistant points her index finger out, past the truck selling hot churros and over to the fields beyond the M53. And then I get it. It’s the smell of hot chocolate sauce mixed with freshly churned shit from the huge Ellesmere Port sewage works, just beyond the Cheshire Oaks boundary line.

The plant is at bursting point, she tells me. Just like the hot sauce spigot in the churros stand it’s just installed a ‘sludge thickening system’, and a new, wider pipeline to deal with the increased effluent from the area’s increased footfall. 

“But we’ve not noticed any difference,” she says. “It’s worse when the wind’s blowing the wrong way.”

It’s not just the pipes they’ve widened. The entire motorway system has been supercharged to accommodate the up-to 12,000 cars a day pouring into the site. It’s no accident that the mall’s chosen location is an easy thirty minutes’ drive from Manchester Airport.

Outside Mowgli I meet John, whose company runs day trips from Manchester city centre. Clipboard in hand, he’s rounding up today’s customers, who return, half-buried beneath bags of bargains. One woman looks like she could have benefitted from an intervention in the Cadbury’s store, and lurches towards us looking like a chocolate Christmas tree, festooned with XXL-sized bars of Whole Nut and Oreos, hanging from every crook of her body. 

“I used to get most of my business taking people to the Lake District or Chester,” John says. “Now all everyone wants to do is shop shop shop. It’s like Black Friday every day here.”

I run to my car as fast as my legs will take me.