A splendid idea has been floated by the newspaper Building Design. Enough with all these architectural prizes and gongs and medals for beauty and magnificence. What we need is a prize for utter ugliness, for architecture so hideous that it could curdle milk. We need a Carbuncle Cup.

It’s far more appropriate for a country daubed with considerably more architectural beasts than beauties. But, alas, there can only be one winner, and it is with great pleasure that I can announce that the inaugural recipient of the Carbuncle Cup is . . . Drake Circus Shopping Centre in Plymouth, a mighty example, writes the newspaper, of “how bad architecture and bad planning can combine to produce something truly awful”.

And truly awful it is. So awful that Jeremy Gould, the Professor of Architecture at the University of Plymouth, which faces the monster across the street, calls it “inexcusable”. Even the city’s own master planner, David Mackay, has ridiculed it, lambasting the monster as “ten years out of date”. It’s so awful that it’s hard to imagine what went through the architects’ minds — hang your head in shame, Chapman Taylor — as they gazed at their computer screens, adding the finishing touches to an exterior so surreally grotesque that Salvador Dalí should be spinning in his grave with envy.

First, two parting waves of mammoth terracotta sheets, set at a jaunty, post-earthquake angle, Libeskind-style, presumably to prove that Plymouth is architecturally with it; followed, with no attempt to smooth the transition, by a huge pregnant bulge of latticed wood; then a large block of chequerboard stone (a feeble nod to local context) topped with a grid of metal panels cut into tree patterns; and then the two gigantic brick drums of the car park, which look like nothing so much as two cheeks of the monster’s bum. It’s so ridiculous that I’d laugh out loud at it if I didn’t think of poor Professor Gould having to suffer it day in, day out.

Inside it’s just the usual mall dumbbell design, anchored at either end (M&S and Primark) and with a glazed canyon in between stuffed with the same old same old: River Island, Schuh, Faith, Office, Zara, New Look. There is, however, an M&S espresso bar for novelty, and the welcome return from the grave of that childhood favourite, Spud-U-Like, in the food court.

And I’ll say this for it, it’s bright. The floors are so shiny that I could use them as a shaving mirror. Walking across them is like gliding across water. Here and there they’re inlaid with glowing lamps or cutesy artworks by local schoolkids, which, with the acres of glass shopfronts and atriums, the candy-coloured fascias and constantly shimmering plasma screens and the mall’s just-out-of-the-wrapper brightness, combine to create an effect so shiny and new and somehow hyper-real that it’s like shopping in the hall of mirrors.

The space, with its artificial gloss, looks as if it jumped straight off one of Chapman Taylor’s computer-generated artist’s impressions and been plopped into the cityscape of Plymouth. The building is gloss, inside and out, a series of predictable flashes to disguise the lack of any sense of place, a series of sugary brands wrapped up in a gaudy wrapper, like architectural junk food, containing the sugar rush of consumerism, but nothing long-lasting.

Junk space, perhaps. No wonder people love it. Sixty thousand turned up when it opened, and today, at 11.30 on a weekday morning it’s in full spate, despite tales of national catastrophe in the high street.

So what? It’s just a shopping mall. The trouble is that Drake Circus is no one-off. Massive malls like this are being built in town centres across the country. Exeter, Nottingham, York, Portsmouth, St Austell, Canterbury, Cardiff . . . few towns are escaping them. They call it urban renaissance, retail-led regeneration. I call it the biggest destruction of city centres since the Sixties. Then the bright hopes of postwar regeneration mostly dissolved into a developer’s free-for-all, as town centre after town centre was refitted with that new invention imported from America, a mall, with car park and ring road attached.

The out-of-town mall rose in the Eighties, but since being effectively banned by John Gummer’s 1993 Planning Policy Guidance 6, and from 1996 the “town centres first” policy of Tory and Labour governments, developers had to go somewhere. So they went back “up town”.

In 1970, 85 per cent of new shops were in town centres. By 1990, it was 34 per cent. By 2000, it had risen again above 50 per cent, and despite the subsequent rise of online shopping, the latest report from the British Council of Shopping Centres forecasts that for the next decade 40 per cent of new retail space will be in town centres. This works out as 15 new Bluewaters in town centres in the next ten years.

It’s about money, of course. The return on commercial property, especially in town centres, has far outstripped that on gilts or equities. A safe bet. And, on the one hand, good news. Money has flooded into town centres.

The problem comes with exactly how the deals are brokered. As with big supermarkets, big mall developers — usually mammoth corporations such as Land Securities, Hammerson and British Land, paired with the same old architects, trusty dullards such as Chapman Taylor — have a lot of clout. They bring with them the promise of turning your town into the new Manchester, cash tills ringing.

Naturally they want the biggest return for the least investment and least hassle: the biggest amount of space wrapped in the least amount of architecture and filled with the least risky chain shops.

It’s up to the council to look them in the eyes and negotiate. Which means that the fate of your town centre is entirely in the hands of our planning system. In some towns, especially where the bourgeois busybody lobby is strong, something decent can result: York’s locals fought successfully against Land Securities’ Coppergate mall (though it’s rearing its head again, despite two planning refusals); Bury St Edmunds has Michael Hopkins’ s pleasant development; and in Exeter the new Princesshay mall has Chapman Taylor tamed by teaming up with the excellent Wilkinson Eyre and Panter Hudspith. The result? Decent design, broken up into civic blocks with the feel of being a normal part of the city.

In cities such as Plymouth or Portsmouth, though, more desperate for investment, airy-fairy aesthetic sensibilities stand no chance. “Regeneration” means handing great chunks of space to the first developer that turns up, then turning a blind eye to the vast, monocultural lumps that it builds, packed with clone stores, then draped inexpertly to hide their clumsy bulk. As a vision of the future of our cities it’s profoundly depressing.

The monsters are multiplying

The world’s largest is the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, which opened in 2005: its total area is 9.6 million sq ft.

Biggest in Greater London will be the Westfield Centre in White City, due to open in 2008, with 265 shops, 15 restaurants and 4,500 parking spaces.

The largest in Scotland is St Enoch Shopping Centre, Glasgow, also Europe’s biggest glass structure.