Where Marmite is concerned, you either love it or hate it. Retailers fall into the same distinct camps when it comes to Westfield London.

An endearing television ad is running at the moment where Paddington Bear causes mayhem at a village fete by adding Marmite to all the sandwiches. The point being that where Marmite is concerned, you either love it or hate it. Retailers fall into the same distinct camps when it comes to Westfield.

It’s exactly a month to the official opening of Westfield London, and all the stops are being pulled out to make sure it hits the date. As the rush to complete it accelerates, some retailers - like Red5 founder Jonathan Elvidge who vented his spleen in last week’s Retail Week - are finding the company’s very Australian approach takes some getting used to.

In his Retail Week column, Elvidge said was particularly unhappy at being asked to pay£4,000 for a water pipe to be brought into his unit from three feet away, and other retailers have also complained told me they’ve found some of the demands from the developer excessive.

But just as many retailers I’ve spoken to - and particularly the larger ones - say they have found Westfield’s straight-talking, can-do approach refreshing and are genuinely excited about the centre. It just happens the Westfield way is quite different to the more established UK developers.

Perhaps the best way of gauging its success is the way in which retailers like Debenhams and Marks & Spencer are following their deals in Derby and London with further openings in its other planned UK schemes such as Bradford, Stratford and Nottingham.

A visit to the White City site a couple of weeks ago with a BBC film crew showed an awful lot to do on most of the stores and an army of workers rushing to get everything done. While some, such as Debenhams, were taking shape, some smaller units still looked like shells.

But while there might be a few finishing touches outstanding when October 30 comes, I would be amazed if the centre doesn’t open on time. The financial and reputational risks would just be too great. And when it does open, my hunch is that it might just raise the bar for shopping centres in the UK.

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