What’s in store for these great British emporia?

When I was a teenager I had a Saturday job at the Lewis’s department store in Birmingham (not to be confused with John Lewis). I got to know and love the rambling store with its arcane cast of shop assistants, floor walkers, sub-managers, store detectives and backroom staff.

Reading the reportDeparting Stores: Emporia at Riskby Harriet Lloyd for Save Britain’s Heritage took me back to those happy days. There have been 237 department store closures in recent years. Like Victorian warehouses or stately homes, the report says, an entire class of buildings has become redundant and risks being lost for ever.

The first Lewis’s opened in Liverpool in 1856 after its founder, David Lewis, returned from a visit to Bon Marche in Paris, the first true department store. The store in Birmingham was built in 1886 at the invitation of Joseph Chamberlain to adorn the newly opened Corporation Street, a grand avenue that the council had cut through the Victorian city and then named after itself.

刘易斯总是去大城市的大商店，我们被告知伯明翰的分店是全国最大的百货商店，尽管这可能有点夸张。1991年，早在当前的零售危机之前，该公司就倒闭了。

I have been reading about the fascinating history of department stores as part of the1851 built environment fellowship. We may regard them as outdated, but they were the malls of their day, ruthlessly commercial institutions, selling off-the-peg fashion and undermining the bespoke tailors, drapers and haberdashers that had dominated retailing.

Lloyd suggests that some were even burnt down by angry shopkeepers. In shades of the 2020 Boohoo scandal, they also were accused by the Victorian social reformer Henry Mayhew of selling luxury fashion manufactured by “sweated labour”.

他们也是那个时代的亚马逊人，出版商品目录，利用新兴的国际邮政服务将货物运送到帝国的各个角落。这些商店是革命性的，产品是贴着价格标签陈列出来的，而不是藏在柜台后面。

顾客可以处理商品，比较质量和价格，欣赏人体模型上的衣服。广告将强调浏览的能力，而不是被迫购买——这是购物作为一种休闲追求的起源。

These were not upmarket institutions even if they sold the idea of attainable luxury. The chairman of the very grand Brown’s of Chester admitted that they targeted ‘the C class of customer’ - artisans and lower middle-class groups who aspired to middle class values.

They sold the mass-produced goods of the industrial revolution, things that were aspirational rather than functional, things you just had to have but did not really need.

One of my favourite stories is that of Paulen’s that originally stood on Stretford Road in Hulme. If you know Manchester you will realise that this is massively off-pitch, in one of the city’s most impoverished neighbourhoods.

Yet Paulden’s was the first store in the city to introduce electric lighting, lifts, escalators and plate glass display windows as well as being the first place in the country to sell Danish pastries!

Paulen’s was acquired by Debenhams in the 1950s, who funded a major refurbishment. But, just as the store was about to reopen, it burnt down and a week later a double-decker bus crashed into it and fell into the basement!

So, instead of rebuilding, Paulden’s moved into a monumental store on Piccadilly Gardens. This was later rebranded as Debenhams and is one of the case studies in the Save report now that it is slated for conversion to offices.

This was also the fate of the Lewis’s store in Birmingham and – looking at it today – there is no hint of what it once was. It makes me wonder what it is we are saving? Some of the case studies in the Save report are very fine buildings, but it was never really about the external appearance.

It was not even about the interiors. Lewis’s was a stage-set with flimsy partitions and suspended ceilings. What was special was the clatter of the foodhall, the heady scent of the beauty department, the glamour of the fashion floors, the hush of the furniture department and the bright lights of electrical.

More than anything else it was about the institution and the tradition that no amount of conservation is going to bring back. This may just be me being old and grumpy!

I was however heartened to read about Bobbies in Bournmouth, a former Debenhams that has been reopened as… a department store! The work of the property company Verve, it includes an art gallery, ice cream parlour, a beauty hall with organic skincare, a microbrewery and a market space to be run by South Coast Makers (plus a foodhall for dogs). If only this could be the fate of all former department stores!