“You’ve never seen anything like it”: multiplexes, shopping malls and sensory overwhelm in Milton Keynes, 1979–1986

Abstract

From 1979, the new town of Milton Keynes embraced a new marketing approach which emphasised its capacity to elicit wondrous, uplifting, and desirable bodily sensations. This coincided with the transformation of the town's central landscape, with Britain's largest mall, The Shopping Building opening in 1979, followed in 1985 by Britain's first multiplex cinema, The Point. This new direction in Milton Keynes' marketing rejected national media narratives of the town's sterility, while reorienting its administration away from the now-toxic political legacy of Keynesianism and towards consumer capitalism. This presented the Shopping Building, The Point and Milton Keynes as a whole, as containing forces that intensified and proliferated potential sensory experiences which resisted quantification and could only be understood fully through immediate presence. This deliberate non-specificity equated the undifferentiated general ideal of sensation with the liberatory capacities of consumer choice, while concealing the encroaching constraints on human possibility arising from commodification of sensations and public space. While critical accounts identified this new determinism as a damaging force, Milton Keynes was nonetheless able to redefine its public image during the early years of the Thatcher government by association with private consumption and private sensation. "You've never seen anything like it" 2

Experimental atmospherics: a multi-sensory perspective

“…The danger, though, is that cross-modal congruency (no matter what form it takes) might give rise to pleonacy, mere repetition in scent, for example, of what may already be shown visually (Banes, 2001). Alternatively, however, combining the senses may also give rise to sensory overload, typically defined as too much sensory input, likely giving rise to detrimental consequences (Doucé and Adams, 2020; Malhotra, 1984; Pikó, 2017). There may, though, be an intriguing territory here in terms of individual differences in the amount of sensory stimulation that different groups of consumers appreciate (Dragutinovich, 1987).…”