THE BOOKSHOP, THE DRAPER, THE CANDLESTICK MAKER: A HISTORY OF THE HIGH STREET by Annie Gray (Profile Books £22, 404pp)
The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Recently– and after half a century – I revisited Newport in South Wales, where I’d spent my youth. It presented a sorry scene.
The once-grand Westgate Hotel – all Victorian ballrooms and wrought iron balustrades – has been shuttered up for two decades and is covered in moss. The old shops and chain stores (M&S, Woolies, Debenhams) have gone. Pubs have gone. The cattle market has gone. Banks have gone.
The only places on view were vape outlets, nail bars, Turkish barbers and Abu Dhabian eateries.
There was a general air of dereliction – yet this was once a bustling commercial hub, where my family and I would go to get school uniforms, winter coats, saucepans, wallpaper, shoes, toys, medicines, books, D’Oyly Carte records, furniture, knitting wool and fancy goods – the porcelain dinner services, canteen of cutlery and carriage clocks given away as wedding presents.
It’s the same everywhere, of course, not just Newport. Only old-timers like me can recall buying posters in Athena, hiring a video in Blockbuster, choosing a jacket in Austin Reed, before going to the Wimpy for a burger.
Annie Gray’s book, therefore, is searingly nostalgic – a history of shopping before everything vanished online; before hateful self scan tills came in; before out-of town malls (frightful sheds) arrived with easier parking; before self-service supermarkets destroyed small-scale shopkeeping.
Day Out: In previous years, shopping was seen as an event or day out while now it has become a chore
Between 1997 and 2002, for example, specialist shops like bakers and butchers were closing at the rate of 50 per week. The Bookshop, the Draper, the Candlestick Maker whisks us back to medieval days, when farmers and artisans came to town with their produce.
Massive crowds gathered in the market square and guildhalls, along with beggars, pickpockets, pedlars, orange-sellers and pie -men: ‘rumours were rampant about horse or cat meat inside pies.’ Public lavatories didn’t exist, so ‘women were left looking for a convenient drain down a side street.’
Market day was a civic focal point, ‘not just for retail, but also for food and drink, plus other activities such as public performance, protest and the enacting of punishments,’ i.e. flinging rotten vegetables at criminals in the stocks.
Purpose-built premises for ‘permanent traders’ started to go up in Elizabethan times, with displays in the window, counters, shelves, tills. By 1600, Norwich had 111 tailors, 60 grocers, 51 shoemakers, 13 barbers, ten haberdashers, five fishmongers and three stationers.
There were 36 butchers’ shops, with glazed tiles and marble slabs, the tang of blood mingling with the smell of sawdust. ‘With meat,’ says Gray, ‘the secret was to feel it at the bone, and then smell your fingers to know if it was off.’
High streets sold everything, from tripe to tulips. Manchester by 1750 boasted 52 drapers, 11 cabinet-makers, eight wig-makers, seven booksellers and one crockery shop.
People began browsing and socialising in the covered walkways and arcades of York, Bath, Tunbridge Wells and Leeds.
‘Shopping excursions as a form of leisure’ evolved, hence Jane Austen’s heroines looking at ribbons and bonnets.
The next development was the creation of the department store, the best-known being Harrods, opening in 1849, where soft furnishings, household linens, gents’ outfitters, womenswear and refreshment rooms could be found under one roof.
The beautiful buildings were often attractions in their own right. Derry & Toms in London’s Kensington had a roof garden with real flamingos. DH Evans in Oxford Street had fabulous, futuristic escalators. But who can beat Selfridges, which opened in 1909, offering even ‘a wart removal service’.
Though some of these emporiums survive, most have been demolished or redeveloped – the Are You Being Served? ambience a distant memory: Barkers (1870) until recently housed this paper’s offices; others I recall were Grants (Croydon, 1894), Rackhams (Birmingham, 1881), Jenners (Edinburgh, 1838), David Morgan (Cardiff, 1891) and Beales (Bournemouth, 1881).
People now don’t want graciousness and grandeur, it seems – they want bargains: closing down sales, end of season sales and damaged stock clearances.
Yet according to Gray this hunt for a bargain is nothing new, customers in the Victorian age were unaware that much of the ‘damaged’ stock on sale ‘had been carefully burnt on the edges by an increasingly inebriated huddle of shop assistants, downing pints and giggling.’
I’d like to think that’s true.
Yet what happened was that palatial Victorian and Edwardian department stores – where shopping was theatre – were replaced by ugly shopping precincts, which necessitated the crude demolition of high streets, tearing out the soul of traditional market towns and cities.
The Arndale Centre in Manchester is a good example of the prevalent horror, perfectly described here as ‘the longest toilet wall in Britain.’
The likes of Birmingham’s Bull Ring, Bradford’s Kirkgate and Peterborough’s Queensgate, are other unlovely brutalist lumps. The Churchill Centre in Brighton is ‘a horrible concrete mess. You only went downstairs as a dare to see if you got away without being knifed or approached by a child molester.’
And if these insalubrious places are themselves now eclipsed by the malls on the ring roads, utilitarian complexes ‘with parking and separate access for deliveries’, which often contain catering outlets and cinemas.
Thing of the Past: Victoria Street in Edinburgh bustling with shoppers
And if the malls are in trouble because, since Covid, we click on Amazon orders instead, which are brought by a man in a van direct to our front doors – nevertheless, we will always need shops of one kind or another, as no one is self-sufficient.
Hats, gloves, barrels, mattresses, candles, buckles, pen knives: they need to be purchased somewhere, somehow.
Online buying, of course, is only an extension of mail-order catalogues, and I was amused to read that this was the traditional and discreet means of acquiring contraceptives, or ‘surgical rubberwear’, as prophylactics were euphemistically dubbed, including ‘condoms concealed in fake cigars’.
This impeccably researched book is unfortunately marred by politically correct, progressive rebukes, as is mandatory these days.
Sugar, we are reminded, was ‘produced under hideously exploitative conditions, which rarely intruded upon the customer’s consciousness.’
I’m sure it didn’t, though does Gray mean ‘conscience’? As for those who enjoyed confectionery, ‘Did they consider the human misery behind their cakes?’ Pig’s bottom, did they.
