The BurJuman Shopping Centre

The BurJuman Shopping Centre.
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It presides over some genuine competition, too. For your credit card’s big day out, you can mix it up with the giants Ibn Battuta, Deira City Centre, Mall of the Emirates, Marina Walk, Dragon Mart and the Outlet Mall.

Or, for a coffee morning and a few specifics, you could visit their cousins, Jumeirah Village, The Dune Centre, Jumeirah Centre, Jumeirah Plaza, Emirates Towers Boulevard, The Oasis Centre, to name but a few.

So it is interesting, then, that when we tested my little theory with a straw poll of friends and colleagues, male and female, young(ish) and old(er), most people state unhesitatingly that when they really need to spend a day shopping, they still prefer to go to the BurJuman Centre.

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In terms of Top Trumps, the BurJuman Centre is not what you’d want as your last card. In fact, I don’t think it’s in the record books for anything. At a mere 800,000ft², it is dwarfed by Dubai Mall.

It is also rather unremarkable as an entertainment destination, boasting no cinemas, ski slopes or bars. Unlike Ibn Battuta (the self-proclaimed ‘largest themed shopping mall in the world’) it is an odd blend of quite incongruous styles.

And bearing in mind that in Dubai an ‘era’ is about five years, it can actually claim to have a foot in two distinct time periods.

But there is a lot about the BurJuman that simply works. The first, and most obvious, is the human scale of the overall space, and the spaces within it. It is on a manageable scale, so it allows you to have an easy location reference in your mind as you walk around.

The old section, which (delightfully) they didn’t make any effort to change when they added the extension a few years ago, has a nostalgic feel.

It harks back to a more sensibly-proportioned and more sedate Dubai, before we started suffering from Guinness-itus and believing that if it wasn’t in the record books, it wasn’t worth building.

The BurJuman’s layout, however, is conveniently linear, so you always retain a sense of where you are. After all, it is
a lot easier to gauge how far you are along something, than where you might be inside it. But what makes it all so user-friendly is the fact that there is, quite literally, a high end and a low end.

And this translates geographically to the level of retail outlet. Cartier, Saks, and Shanghai Tang are at one end, and Hallmark and the Watch-House are at the other. How refreshingly simple! And how civilised that the BurJuman offers both.