I imagined I was Grand Design’s Kevin McCloud driving through a charming valley on the way to see a magnificent new building rising from the hilltop.

And then, there it is, a giant big grey box, but methinks it is all made out of ticky tacky, and, well, what a shame. It looked glum.

I parked round the back, on the old pavement, not sure about driving up the front ramp and, based on past experiences of mall carparks, wary of losing my car and circumnavigating stacked floors for hours.

Maybe I should have parked the other side of Mitchell Drive, I pondered, and walked in through the car parks, like bus travellers are forced to do. I must say, I am surprised planning approval for the new mall didn’t insist on a front door, under cover, bus stop. Public transport users shouldn’t be treated as second class citizens.

I thought I’d walk through the old sections of the mall first, and was surprised how little had changed. Woolworths, Coles, Big W, all still there.

The glamour, the whiz bang, the new and confronting must be in the new wing and upstairs, I thought.

I expected I could write futuristic things about the new mall. I wanted to download a Stockland Green Hills app and be enticed by instant shopper deals. I wanted to see new digital tracking technologies in play, steering me to products matching my consumer profile built from my credit card history and social media profile. And I wanted to see the very latest in funky store fronts.

But none of these. The new sections are, well, just newer, with scores of additional retailers that even I have heard of, that look very much like the sort of national brand retailers you would find in a Stockland mall.

I passed some time flicking through one of those large digital store directories noting how much floor space is given over to the clothing and beauty spend of young women – it’s the same the world over.

By this stage I was wondering what the pitch of the mall is. Nothing suggests a fresh food theme (there’s not even a greengrocer), a high fashion theme, a community high street theme, or an entertainment theme.

But then I entered the food quarter. There, as I had counted from the store directory, lay the bulk of the mall’s 31 fast food and refreshments outlets. While the rest of the mall closes at 5.30pm, the mall’s food venues fry and whizz their offerings throughout the evening.

Perhaps this is Stockland’s pitch: a big box of convenience food for the lower Hunter’s rapidly-growing commuter belt? Folk too worn and frazzled to cook mid-week, too time poor to stroll down High Street Maitland and buy from the Levee’s earth market; too detached to support town centres where there are libraries and galleries, political party meetings, dance studios; where kids ride their pushies right down the middle of the street, where teenagers can nick into a lane for private doings, where a dog can pee on a post, where you can sit under an awning and drink your coffee and wait until the rain clears so you can walk home, and nod, smile even, at people you know.