The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker

I was really excited to read this history of the English high street, and it totally delivered. I was going to say British there but whilst I think the book might have mentioned Welsh or Scottish shops occasionally it was definitely pretty much all about England.

The story begins with marketplaces as they begin to spawn fixed shops in around about the seventeenth century and then each chapter takes you into a new era of the high street having a look at the different kind of shops that appear over time. And at the end of each time period there’s a walk down a particular English shopping street. I think I’ve visited every high street covered in detail in the book. I know some of them better than others but it was really nice to feel at home in a book.

What’s going to stick with me from this book is how much “it’s not what it used to be” has been the cry for centuries. There’s nothing new about the modern “death of the high street”. As its true in many other contexts people complaining about change is the one thing you can rely on. Once upon a time the complaints were that middlemen were ruining everything - it was originally illegal to buy and sell and products were supposed to be purchased from their producers and household self sufficiency was the ideal, though not an ideal that was ever really a reality. It’s all basically been downhill from there! More recently self-service was seen as the path to ruin - this isn’t the self-checkout that we’re currently converting to (and obviously complaining about) but the method of selecting your own produce from the shelves rather than being served from a counter. Everything new was complained about once. And it’s very clear that the nostalgia is very much rose tinted in many places. For example needing to visit many different shops and exchange pleasantries to procure your shopping demanded you spent a lot of your time, or your wife’s time, or you employed a servant to do it.

Though I’m really not someone who thinks the past was better I still really enjoyed the nostalgia of spotting all the chain shops I grew up with, many of which have gone now, the Woolworth’s and the Debenham’s. Then there’s the mentions of things I knew but not in their hey day, like Whiteley’s of Bayswater which I knew well in its 1990s shopping centre era. I enjoyed finding out about names that turn up in books but I never knew myself, Home & Colonial is a name that stands out in that category but there were many more mentioned that I knew but didn’t. Plus all the tearooms! I feel like in the 1970s and 1980s of my childhood British Home Stores cafe was height of sophistication, it’s odd to find out that that opinion isn’t really so far off the mark.

It was a really enjoyable read and I’m left with a new appreciation for what we still have on the high street and how it serves us today; changing as it always has done.