In Bicester Village, England is for sale

The outlet is the second most popular attraction for Chinese tourists visiting the UK

Three excited Chinese women are talking loudly on the train to Bicester Village. I can make out a few words. “Fendi,” one says. “Gucci.” I ask why they are visiting, and they consult each other in Mandarin. “Discount,” says the young woman opposite me. She laughs. “Shopping is,” she pauses, “nice.” Her friend nods. The New South China Mall in Dongguan and the Golden Resources Mall in Beijing are the largest and second-largest shopping centres in the world, but for some reason Chinese tourists in Britain still come to Bicester Village, a 600m-long fake high street on the side of the A41. The strip comprises 150 cut-price designer outlets, and is the second most popular attraction for Chinese tourists visiting the UK after Buckingham Palace. It is not to be confused with the nearby town of Bicester, whose high street has seven charity shops and exactly zero luxury boutiques.

Value Retail PLC, which owns Bicester Village, tries to make everything about the journey to Oxfordshire feel easy, to remove the usual troubles of British public transport. At Marylebone Station, a man and woman in scarlet cloaks had ushered me into a special waiting room for Bicester travellers only, with velvet sofas and photos of Fortnum & Mason biscuits and tea on the walls. In the main station, a man had been screaming outside Upper Crust. In our secluded room, he and his noise did not exist.

Announcements on the train are made in English, Arabic and Mandarin, thrilling the Chinese women. They have been on holiday here for a few weeks, and this is the second time they have left London. I ask where else they have been. One woman types into Google Translate and shows me the result on her phone: “White Cliff”. When I ask what she thinks of England, she shrugs and points out the train window at the muddy fields. In Chinese she types “soil”.

Bicester Village was built in the 1990s, but aside from a few red telephone boxes, nothing about it resembles pre-millennial England. It feels like a ski village. The luxury stores are cladded in painted wood.A glass box in the middle of the high street contains a pyramid of pink Ladurée macarons. Another displays Northface jackets. Pots of neat shrubbery between shops are marked with plaques engraved with quotes. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Earth laughs in flowers.” Queen Elizabeth II: “Good memories are our second chance at happiness.”

The clientele at Bicester Village is a mix of elegant foreigners arriving in Maybach taxis and British couples from London and the Home Counties wearing matching athleisure. A woman in Miu Miu glasses and a tracksuit speaks animatedly on the phone. “What do you think the price was?” she says. “One hundred and forty pounds! I’ll get one each. That’s a no-brainer.” Another woman complains to her husband: “I haven’t got anything for myself. I’ve only got presents. I thought about a jacket that was £2,600 down to £1,000, but I’m not going to get that.”

The shops work hard to accommodate their clients. In Burberry, a woman is hand-painting Chinese New Year greetings on red paper: “Wishing you a prosperous Year of the Horse.” These greetings are complimentary with a purchase. There are many complimentary things for customers in Bicester Village. (Never ask if something is “free”, an assistant told me. Always “complimentary”.) Some assistants in Dior speak Mandarin. Both Burberry and Dior operate one in, one out policies to keep the inside of the shop feeling quiet and exclusive.

A concierge says international visitors like Dior best because it is the brand’s only cut-price outlet in the world. British customers are less fancy. They prefer the homeware shop The White Company. “I don’t know why,” she says.

A middle-aged woman called Sue, from Hornchurch in Essex, is sitting on a bench outside Burberry. She’s just been to Coach, her favourite shop, and spent £400 on a bag, a passport holder and shoes, which she has dropped off with the concierge. They will wrap these up and deliver them to the train station.

Sue usually comes to the village in July and December, but last year a manager at Gucci told her the bargains were actually better in February. She got bored in Burberry so is watching passers-by while her friends shop. “You get a real mix of people because it’s so well known for the prices,” she says. “It is all normally last-season stuff, if you don’t mind that.”

Another middle-aged woman, Pam, has come with her husband, Aidan, as part of an anniversary trip. A purple bruise has bloomed under Pam’s eye. “I haven’t been beaten up!” she says. “I’ve had cheek fillers.” People are looking at her funny, she says – maybe they think Aidan has punched her? Aidan looks appalled. “I’d never do that!”

Aidan thinks the discounts are a lot worse than they once were. “I used to come here about ten, 15 years ago and it was totally different,” he says. “I used to walk into the Ralph Lauren shop and spend about six, seven, eight hundred quid, and I used to walk out with about 20 bags of shopping. You go in there now and see a jumper for like 400 quid.” He shakes his head. “It’s not the same.”

But Bicester Village still sells the feeling of being rich. The visitors don’t care that they are buying last season’s luxury; it is the brands and what they signal that matter. Value Retail PLC has just introduced a new “hands-free shopping” experience, which means customers can spend £3,500 on a rainbow coat from Dior (RRP £7,000) and not suffer the indignity of holding their own shopping. Around seven million people visit Bicester Village a year, and they spend on average six hours there. They eat at Ottolenghi or the TikTok-famous apple crumble shop, Humble Crumble.

Nothing about Bicester Village feels dangerous. There are no vape shops, no crime, no rough sleepers or real life. Just a range of people with money. A woman leaves her baby in a stroller outside Pret a Manger to hunt for a quick bargain across the street. She doesn’t seem worried. “People feel safe,” a concierge tells me, comparing the environment to King’s Road in Chelsea, without the traffic. “There’s every walk of life, and every walk of dog,” he says sagely. We watch a fat Husky waddle towards Dolce & Gabbana.

Even the Bicester Village dogs are well groomed and well behaved. In Prada, on a sofa next to crocodile-skin-style moccasins (down from £2,400 to £1,560) and a woolly orange hat (RRP £410, here £205), sits a silky white dog in a diamond tiara. A turtlenecked woman carries her Spaniel around Gucci like a baby. In Moncler, the Italian brand that was once an official supplier to Olympic teams but is now worn by rappers like Central Cee, dog coats are reduced from £400 to £147.

It is starting to rain. Men huddle smoking under the awning outside Saint Laurent, holding bags of their partners’ shopping. Drizzle trickles off the sloped roofs. The queues outside Dior and Burberry aren’t getting any smaller. Women surge into Charlotte Tilbury, which is offering a 70 per cent discount. They walk out clutching four or five lipsticks in one hand.

As the road reaches the car park, I ask a security guard if this is the end. “Not the end of life,” he says cheerily. “The end of Bicester Village.”

I walk back to the train station. The lounge is stacked with well-being books like The Art of Soulful Living and smells of spices and leather. That too is for sale, obviously. “Love the aroma in the air?” reads a sign. “Scan the QR code to discover more.”

[Further reading: The decline and fall of the samurai]