TO RETIREMENT
0262 Town Shopping
When we lived in Chelsea we used to go to Oxford Street for our clothes shopping and consumer durables. Oxford Street hadn't really changed in decades, and it didn't change much in the decades afterwards. The heart of the shopping then was the department store. Even Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street was, in effect, a department store except that it was devoted almost entirely to clothes. It did then also sell food, but only a very narrow range; of which cake was its specialty. I still remember its delicious slab fruitcake, which has long since disappeared.
When we moved to Slough we used the shops in the centre of town, where there were a couple of small department stores. The Co-op was the largest of these, where it was then one of the biggest retailers at all levels. This was fairly typical of our high streets at the time.
Moving to Knutsford, we again got into the habit of shopping in the city centre, this time in Manchester; which was a slightly smaller version of London’s Oxford Street. Burton on Trent on the other hand, was much less well catered for. The nearest large shopping centre -- Birmingham -- was too far away for us to visit it very often. Instead, we once or twice we went to Nottingham, which was a halfway house in terms of size.
Back in London, in Molesey, we used mainly to shop in Kingston, which then had just one department store (Bentalls), though this was a large one. Another opened after we left. Kingston sported a fairly conventional high street, with all the retailers that you would expect : Marks & Spencer, Boots, Woolworths, WM Smith, BHS etc.
Now, in Milton
Keynes, we have a regional shopping centre. This sounds magnificent, and I
suppose it is quite a useful facility, but all it contains is multiple versions
of the same shops now to be seen on every high street. We now have four largish
department stores; Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Debenhams and House of Fraser.
We also have every multiple shoe and clothes shop you m
ight
ever want, But, despite its size, its two parallel malls are each half a mile
long, and it has good amenities, it lacks a certain charm or even personality.
What has happened
over recent years, especially since we moved to Milton Keynes, is that all the
small shops -- the independents -- have been swamped by the large national
chains.
These
chains already existed, right back to the 1960s. Even then, though, they were
hidden under different brand names. Thus, for example, shoe shops on the high
street – under a range of brand names - were dominated by the British Shoe
Corporation which owned many of them. In addition, the other chains - such as
Marks & Spencer's, Littlewoods and British Home Stores - were already dominant
in their own right; though Woolworths was in decline, as now are Boots and WH
Smith. So nothing really fundamentally new has emerged. What has emerged has
been the replication, with very slight modification, of these models each
competing for the same marketplace.
In
particular, the key essence of the models has been seized upon, first by ASDA
and then by
Tesco, who have – in effect – moved the malls under their own roofs; at
their own out of town locations.
The other thing that has increased, driven by the baby-boom of post-war period, is the financial services sector. In particular building societies have proliferated. Luckily in Milton Keynes these are scattered around the outside of the precincts, so we don't really notice them, but elsewhere they have taken their sites away from the traditional small retailers.
Though the proliferation of high street shops, and in particular the increasing dominance of the out of town superstore, might have been thought to have provided better choice, in fact it hasn't. The loss of the small independents means that the choices have actually reduced quite dramatically.
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