Clear Digital Digest: Brent Cross, VR Happy Meals and Russian Cigarette Adverts

Brent Cross, not yesterday (image: Londonist)

Reviewing the past week, one milestone that came to my attention was the UK’s first “American style” shopping centre, Brent Cross in North London, turning 40 on Wednesday.  Having lived around the area myself for about 15 years now, as a regularly irregular visitor to Brent Cross I did enjoy these old photos and selected stories (including starring roles for the centre in Bond films and Bloc Party videos) charting its history.

Moving onto the modern day, this week’s big ecommerce news was Amazon’s wholesale tie-up with Morrisons, enabling Amazon to expand on their Pantry offering with fresh and frozen produce, likely to be available to UK consumers within a few months.  Looking back to Brent Cross, this continuing innovation makes one question what the shopping centre will look like in a further 40 years; Amazon itself is indeed already using Brent Cross as a pick-up point with one of its Lockers available there. 

As the viability of shopping centres and high streets themselves continues to need to encourage socialising and eating out opportunities more and more, above and beyond “traditional shopping”, some interesting innovation from McDonalds also caught my eye this week.  Inspired by the continuing hype around Virtual Reality (which continued apace at last week’s World Mobile Congress) and Google’s cheap Cardboard option, McDonalds are today launching in Sweden an ingenious combination of VR with a Happy Meal box, named “Happy Goggles”.

​Other big international news this week has of course been the seemingly never-ending race to select US presidential candidates, with “Super Tuesday" hogging headlines worldwide this week.  Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable surge to become the Republican nominee has obviously concerned many in the States, with Google’s data editor tweeting that searches for “move to Canada” grew by 350% as polling results started to roll in.

2 final links from me:

• Going back even further in time than the birth of Brent Cross (and much further away geographically too!) these Russian cigarette adverts from the 1920s are well worth a look: stunning design and also fairly bizarre. 
• One for music buffs and content nerds:  an interesting (and fairly lengthy) read from Vice’s music cousin Noisey on the decline of the album review and what this says about the ever changing world of journalism, taste makers and the constant shifts brought about by digital and social media.

The roaring 20s (image: Mashable)