Some commentators put a sour interpretation on every aspect of the razzmatazz opening this week of Westfield, the £1.7 billion 40-acre shopping centre in Shepherds Bush, West London. But then, the recession, as I am increasingly noticing, is being used as an excuse to demonise even modest spending. Retail should never be therapy. But it can be a cure of sorts for some of our current ills.

The opportunities to sneer ranged from the swishness of the mall's decor to the celebrities who were present - some of them, such as Leona Lewis, stars from Simon Cowell's reality TV stable.

An urban myth has already sprung up that “half the metamorphic layer of Italy” lies in Westfield's expanses of marble flooring, increasing the ire of the miserabilist (and closet elitist) tendency that thinks that ordinary people should not be walking on any surface towards a shop today. Or on any other Saturday while the recession lasts.

For his critics, Cowell is the Hank Paulson of showbiz - a man of overweening power, bad attitude and dubious judgment. These detractors cannot understand the new culturally omnivirous trend in which it's OK to appreciate equally Cowell's show The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, shopping - and Strindberg.

It is true that Westfield is making its debut just as recession takes centre stage in all our thoughts. It is also debatable whether the centre's architecture is iconic, as its creators claim, or a lacklustre addition to the cityscape of the metropolis.

But it is one thing to question Westfields's aesthetics and another one to query its need to exist at this moment when we so need a boost.

One especially crabby commentator described Westfield as a construction project that could have been “anywhere” and added that it would have been better for London “if it were nowhere”. But in a contest between the merits of Westfield's undulating glass roof or the 7,000 jobs created beneath it, I think we all know the winner.

At the centre on Thursday morning, Westfield's gala opening day, the crowds all seemed mightily pleased that it was there. Some had come to gawk, some to spend, but all seemed to be resolved to set aside for a moment the frustration over such matters as the failure of banks to pass on the reduction in money market swap rates to mortgage borrowers.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who performed the opening ceremony, enjoined the throng to stop “popping the gloomadons”. “My thoughts, exactly, Boris!”, I felt like shouting. And they seemed to be the thoughts, too, of the throng who may not have been quite sure what a gloomadon was, but certainly did not want to encounter one that morning. An X Factor star, however, was quite a different matter. A queue formed outside Next where Dannii Minogue, one of Cowell's fellow judges, was signing autographs. I listened to see if they were as curious as I was to observe at first hand the face of the tiny Australian. Was she, as is rumoured, the embodiment of the skills of clever cosmetic surgeons or a natural cutie?

As all we regular viewers of The X Factor know, it must be tough for Dannii to be constantly compared with her fellow judge - “that gorgeous Cheryl Cole”. It is one of the many pyschological undercurrents that makes this Saturday evening show so compelling.

In one of the centre's 50 cafés - a number that embodies dangerous excess for those who believe that other people cannot curb their consumption of anything - four contractors who had worked until dawn on one of the 265 shops shared a bottle of champagne.

On huge screens, the face appeared of the lustrous Leona Lewis, Cowell's most successful discovery to date and an advertisement for what the right shade of lip gloss can do, in or out of a credit crunch. “Did you know that sales of lipstick rise in a recession?” remarked the woman sitting next to me to a friend. “Well, you've got plenty of choice in here to test out that economic theory,” said her friend, tucking into a tarte aux fraises.

It is the chance to overhear such conversations, while having a snack, that for me puts the mall ahead of the high street in the entertainment league. The stress of a trip to Oxford Street turns even my wittiest friends into whining bores, whereas the

very name of Bluewater, the mega-mall in Kent, conjures up a pleasure jaunt.

Leona was singing Forgive Me, her new single. I wondered whether the commentators who had, in the words of another lyric, “been falling over themselves to get all of the misery right” in their pronouncements about the mall's prospects might also be in need of forgiveness in a year or two.

Certainly, the crowds that filled the centre again yesterday suggest that it was not solely Leona's high notes and Dannii's winsomeness that will draw the public to this new West London landmark.

Westfield's Australian owners concede that the timing of the Behemoth of the Bush's arrival may not be good, but they also point to the survival and success of some of their other 119 centres worldwide that made their entrance just as the economy slumped.

The doom-mongers will argue that a glittering shopping centre is a pernicious inducement to indiscriminate spending just when households should be watching the pennnies.

I would argue that this censorious and patronising view underestimates the intelligence and wisdom of families, most of whom are not dangerously overextended. They are also quite capable of recalculating their budgets to ensure that they are not financially imperilled if the recession is more drawn out than expected.

If nothing else, a mall can be a place to keep warm at someone's else expense, one reason why Westfield will, I suspect, be full again today - with people who go home to sing along with X Factor or mimic the Latino moves of Strictly Come Dancing. Cheap thrills, that's what we need just now.

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