March 28, 2024

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Back to the future with London’s Lost Department Stores

Back to the future with London’s Lost Department Stores

Our high streets are even now littered with the stays of former section merchants which includes the shells of after dazzling retailers of Debenhams, Home of Fraser and BHS that have been just lately joined by numerous John Lewis & Companions homes.

Amid the carnage these days it is outstanding to believe that that London (and its suburbs) by itself supported about 100 division merchants in the 1900s. But it is true and proof of this amazing period of time is chronicled in the a short while ago revealed e-book ‘London’s Shed Department Stores’ from Harmless Haven Publications.

It provides an easy-studying snapshot of an array of these now sadly departed grand shops like numerous acquainted names to me: Dickens & Jones, Waring & Gillow, Barkers, Significant Biba, Whiteleys and Allders. There’s also numerous that experienced lengthy ceased buying and selling prior to I moved down to the capital including Stagg & Mantle, Pratts, Gorringes and the terrifically named Bodgers.

The anecdote-pushed accounts of these many merchants really substantially offers a social record of purchasing from the Victorian period of time onwards. It is enhanced by chapters on similar themes such as pioneering women in the sector and department retailers during war.

As perfectly as getting published in an available fashion by creator Tessa Boase the e-book is more introduced to lifetime by the fantastic range of images that add drastically to the publication. The image-rich format with specific office shop profiles ensures this is a e book that can be effortlessly dipped into each time the reader fancies a little bit of nostalgia and wishes to be be transported to a period when retail really was providing an remarkable amount of money of theatre to shoppers.

We now reside in a period of time when merchants are concentrating at any time much more on injecting greater encounters into their bodily stores and this book will not only choose them again in time but it may well also issue them in the way in which they want to go with their corporations in the foreseeable future.

London’s Shed Section Shops is out there from Protected Haven Textbooks priced £16.99.

Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider