The aim of the new project is to duplicate online the real-life experience of a shopping expedition in central London, reports the Times:

Stung by the growing popularity of internet shopping – online sales in November were up 16% on last year – the body representing West End traders is creating a unique internet world where shoppers will be able to wander down computer simulations of London streets, click their way into exact replicas of well-known stores, and thumb through goods stacked on virtual shelves.

The aim is to combine the speed and efficiency of internet shopping with the sense of exploration and discovery that real high-street browsing entails. By turning the London shopping experience into an elaborate online haven filled with spectacular graphics and clever animations, more than 600 West End traders from Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street could sell more goods online, and lure more shoppers away from their keyboards for a taste of real shopping.

The £8m scheme is the brain-child of Alex Wrottesley, a budding media entrepreneur whose Near software company has joined forces with broadband provider Be, a subsidiary of O2, to create an interactive computer model of the main shopping streets in central London.

The virtual West End is to be known as Near London, says the Times, and will be open for business in October 2009. “Any real-life shop-owners on a street included in the project can open their virtual doors to passers-by for a ‘rent’ of £40 a month. They can then use the doors as portals to their own websites, or use Near‘s designers to replicate their shop interiors in the style of the rest of the project.”

The idea has not met with an overwhelmingly positive response from commenters on the Times website, one of whom asks whether this is a return to 2001 and another who sugges

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