Shopping centres equivalent to eight Bluewaters are due to open over the course of 2008 and 2009, just as the economy heads into its worst period for more than a decade.

A total of 1.25 million sq m will be opened in the next 18 months, the first of which was the Liverpool ONE city centre development, which centres on a new John Lewis and the largest Debenhams in Britain.

According to Mark Hudson, retail and consumer leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers: “The amount of space coming on is potentially massive and, with the trading conditions we have and the ongoing shift towards online, it's going to mean more empty shops in market towns. More marginal sites will become unprofitable and more companies will go bust.”

Nearly a dozen retailers have collapsed into administration since the turn of the year, including Dolcis, Ethel Austin, Base, The Sleep Depot and Toyzone.

New developments such as Liverpool One, and two more mammoth centres due to open later this year - Bristol Cabot Circus and Westfield London - take years of planning and are almost impossible to stop.

However, a number of smaller developments, including a regeneration scheme in Dumfries and another in Chester, have been postponed as the credit crunch affects funding and the number of retailers signing up to the project. This month St Modwen put the development of a £100 million retail-led development in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, on hold because of the retail and economic climate.

Alistair Parker, head of Cushman & Wakefield, the property development consultancy, said: “The monster malls take ten years to deliver. They are like oil tankers - once set down, they take a while to slow.”

Mr Parker said that new centres such as Liverpool One were essential to reviving areas where most of the retail estate pre-dated the Second World War: “Liverpool believed it was losing large amounts of trade over the years to everywhere else, so the effect will be to pull that trade back to Liverpool. Clearly, other areas will lose out, but that's what drives improvement.”

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