I moved away from the UK in 2007 and I understand there have been quite significant changes to the high street in general over there since then. I live in NZ now and the malls around here are integrated like I described. They're also quite small because population.

I will call bullshit on my own original post though. I used to live near Santa Rosa CA and that had a mall that spilt into the street stores that I had forgotten about, so it's not actually a difference between the US and the rest of the world. My general point though is I think those are friendlier malls than the out of town variety.