Inside Bicester Village – the bizarre shopping centre that’s as popular as Buckingham Palace with Chinese tourists
I find these places “hell on earth” and currently Christmas “hell on earth” but some people like them including tourists…..
You may never had heard of it, but this rural England shopping centre is almost as popular among Chinese tourists as Buckingham Palace.
From end to end, the high street of Bicester Village stretches the same length as the Champs Elysee, according to chief merchant Desiree Bollier. However the high-end outlet village out on a limb an hour from London perhaps bears more similarities with the Las Vegas strip, the quiet wilds of Oxfordshire its Nevada desert.
Either way, the artificial high street boasts visitor numbers that would draw envy from both Sin City and the French capital, with 6.4 million treading its well-manicured retail avenue last year – a number that aligns Bicester with the UK’s most popular attraction, the British Museum, and trumps the National Gallery and Tate Modern.
This week it opened a new extension, adding some 30 more boutiques to its 130 existing. Fashion operators Roksanda and Christopher Kane, Orlebar Brown and Valentino join the big names of Prada, Gucci, Armani and Versace.
The draw, however, is not so much the brands as the bargains: up and down the Village (incidentally the same length, too, as Oxford Street, at 1.2 miles), hefty percentage cuts slash eye-watering numbers down to merely ludicrous. More humane outlets – North Face, Levi’s, Clark’s, and the like, also offer discounts, providing decent buys for sartorial mortals.