But it is true that we have now got to the point where the mall is, in the jargon of the business, a "destination". People will go to Bluewater for at least a half-day out, especially on Sunday - for the act of shopping is coming ever closer to an act of worship, something that, bizarrely, even British churches now acknowledge in their proposed Millennium Liturgy. So we will go there, nose to tail in our cars along the M25, burning millions of gallons of fuel that would otherwise remain unburned, hoping to experience something life-enhancing. And what will we find there? Marks and Spencer, John Lewis, House of Fraser and hundreds of other familiar names. Plus lots of cafes and restaurants. Plus a cinema complex. All the usual ingredients of a 1990s shopping mall, in fact, given the added twist of some lakes, trees and greensward threaded through the vast two-level car parks outside. You will be able to go boating and fishing there, they say. Later there will be a hotel, for those who just cannot tear themselves away.

However, if places such as Bluewater were not built, we would not miss them for a second. The inhabitants of south-east England have not been twiddling their thumbs for years, staring out of their windows, yearning for the glorious release of a very big shopping centre in a worked-out chalk pit. Were it not there, they would all go about their lives as they do now - shopping elsewhere, going to the cinema elsewhere, having a cup of coffee elsewhere, going fishing elsewhere. Those elsewhere-places are about to lose out. Because although new shopping centres are very good at generating traffic and money, they cannot generate more money in the pockets of the people going there. Something has got to give. If Bluewater starts taking all the cash that people in its region habitually spend, then Elsewhere does not. It is all very straightforward.

Of course, the stuff we buy out of town is exactly the same as the stuff we buy in-town, and costs the same, plus petrol money. But we go to the out-of-town malls because we can park there, for free, and because there is the prospect of more for the children to do than in a town centre. This does not seem like much to offer, you'd think, but it is apparently enough to generate those 30 million visits a year by people who may drive for up to an hour to get to Bluewater. Our love affair with the suburbs grows ever more passionate. Indeed, Bluewater is the germ of a complete new town, since thousands of houses are due to be built in the next chalk-pit along, and it will have its own international railway station at Ebbsfleet on the Channel tunnel rail link. You will able to live the dream.

Kuhne likes to think of himself as a cut above your everyday architect, and is unfortunately inclined to write lines of mawkish doggerel to describe his creation. "White chalk cliffs and water blue/Surround a crystal city new" are the opening lines of a Kuhne sonnet about Bluewater. He also likes to cut-and-paste quotes from English poets in giant letters along the malls. He appears fully to believe that he is somehow improving the human lot by dumping Bluewater on us. He also thinks he has made the place very English, and this is a hoot, since it is about as English as the London of Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians.

To experience a real English shopping mall, go to the almost as huge and almost as new Cribbs Causeway centre outside Bristol, by architects BDP. There you will find the same shops and the same vast car parks as at Bluewater, but arranged around a mall that is designed in a cool, understated fashion. Very white, very glassy. A mall that acknowledges its function, that eschews theming, that understands it is part of an architectural history that began with the glazed arcades of the 18th century. Its demographic and ecological impact on its region, of course, is no different from Bluewater's. In some respects it is worse, since Cribbs is built amid a slew of older retail sheds on what was previously farmland: at least Bluewater re-uses what was an industrial site. But once you are inside Cribbs, you do not feel patronised. At Bluewater, the condescension is overwhelming, not least in its heavy-handed theming.