Why UK's No 2 lure for Chinese tourists is fashion outlet village
High concentration of designer label stores, and discount prices, has made Bicester Village, west of London, a shopping mecca for visitors, and new express train makes it even more attractive
Taking a train and then a bus to get to the designer outlet mall in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside has always been a bit of a faff. Nevertheless, it doesn't put off the thousands of Chinese tourists who descend on the village each year to snap up bargain-priced Prada, Burberry and Stella McCartney.
Now that journey has been made simpler and much swifter by a direct service from Marylebone station (helpfully aided by Mandarin signs at the station). So in a little more than 40 minutes shoppers are whizzed from central London to the very gates of Bicester Village. Within two minutes of alighting the train they can be in the Chloé shop looking at silky shirts or trying on Sergio Rossi shoes.
Unlike in China, it seems to take decades to get any infrastructure built in the UK; nonetheless, a shopping mall has somehow pulled rank on all the other railway-construction projects with a new rail link, which joins London with Oxford Parkway that just so happens to have a station en route at the gates of Bicester Village.
At the official opening of the railway line Prime Minister David Cameron declared everyone should visit Bicester Village, adding, "if only I could make it law".
Of course, if you love designer fashion and you love a bargain, you could say the planners have got it right. The village, which attracted 6.3 million shoppers last year, looks like a clapboard New England town parachuted into the rolling English countryside back in 1995. It's the place to score a Tod's handbag for £600 (HK$7,100), a fold-over Céline tote for £460, Rupert Sanderson shoes for about £200 or a Prada coat for about £1,000, which sounds expensive, but given that brand's enormous rise in prices recently, perhaps not.
The reason is that these designer brand stores sell edits of past seasons' collections at about 60 per cent of the original retail price. In stock when we visit are the autumn-winter 2014 collections, but there are a few rails of deconstructed brocade from Prada's spring-summer 2015 collection, Miu Miu dresses and Marni's creamy raw-edged linen shifts for the eagle-eyed earlybirds.