Department Stores
Oxford Street and Regent Street are still today considered the main shopping streets of the capital, boasting hundreds of stores. The link between the West End and shopping has been existing since the early nineteenth century. A growing number of people experienced an increase in their disposable income during this period, which meant that they had more money to indulge in ‘conspicuous consumption’. And indulge they would, in the large, glamourous department stores that studded the West End.
Fashionable ladies outside Harrods, 1909
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the West End slowly took over as fashionable shopping centre from the City, as commerce followed the aristocracy who was moving westwards. With the development of Regent Street in the 1820s, the West End had established itself permanently as the place to shop. Until then, most shops had tended to be specialised, but in the mid-decades of the nineteenth century, drapers were the first retailers to gradually expanded their premises and range of products, founding what today might be described as ‘proto-department stores’. (1) The linen-draper William Whiteley is commonly credited to owned London’s first department store, including 17 departments in 1867, after expanding his store in Bayswater – then a suburb of London – to include a meat and green grocery department. His customers were able to consume anything from silks and satins to greens and meat. (2)
By emulating the hugely successful Parisian stores, London’s department stores developed quickly and responded to their customers’ needs and demands. Shopping at one of these places became so much more than the simple act of purchasing goods – it became an experience. Visitors from further afield made up a large part of the stores customers, who would often spend the entire day at one of London’s retail palaces.
A Day’s Shopping is one of the most agreeable occupations a Lady can devise, but pleasure is toil without agreeable relaxation and rest. (3)
In order to fulfil this desire and encourage their customers to spend more time – as well as money – in the stores, adequate provisioning was made. Owners did then not only beautify their show rooms over the following decades, they also started to expand their offer of amenities. By the turn of the century, the most luxurious department stores included every comfort a customer could wish for. In 1909, for example, Harrods boasted:
… elegant and restful waiting and retiring rooms for both sexes, writing rooms with dainty stationary, club room, fitting rooms, smoking rooms, a post office, theatre ticket office, railway and steamer ticket and tourist office, appointment board where one can leave notes for friends, a circulating library and music room. (4)
Harrods advert from 1897 listing 80 different departments
Department stores were quick to incorporate new technologies; thus in 1898, Harrods became the first department store in Britain to install an escalator (which, at that time, was only a flat conveyor belt). (5) Advertising, too, became more sophisticated. Entire departments were created for the purpose; who were responsible for designing increasingly elaborate adverts and placing them in newspapers and magazines. The American millionaire Harry Gordon Selfridge famously spent £36,000 (the equivalent of £2.35 million today!) on his advertising campaign alone prior to the opening of his brand-new department store in March 1909. During the week of its opening, thirty-eight adverts appeared in over one hundred pages of eighteen national newspapers, causing a sensation and resulting in over 90,000 visitors Selfridge’s opening day, and over one million during the first week. (6)
The typical ‘shopper’ is frequently imagined and presented as a (respectable) woman. The female shopper, so argues historian Eirka Rappaport, came to symbolise a healthy urban economy. (7) Indeed, scholars argue that the department stores provided a ‘safe space’ for women to meet and spend time outside the home. It cannot be denied that the department store was an overtly feminine space with women forming the majority of customers as well as staff. Yet, although shopping took on heightened feminine connotations during this period, it is important to acknowledge that men also had their place within contemporary consumer culture, as some historians have convincingly demonstrated. (8) Although the male consumer purchased primarily at specialised shops, department stores did offer specialised sections for their male customers.
London’s department stores still attract millions of customers, many of whom are tourists. Their sumptuous window displays, gorgeous interiors, and variety of products render them an attraction, then as now.
(1) Claire Masset, Department Stores (Oxford: Shire Library, 2010): 7.
(2) Erika D. Rappaport, “The Halls of Temptation: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 1 (1996): 58.
(3) Warehouse and Draper’s Trade Journal, Apr 15, 1872, 4.
(4) Quoted in Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Hamilton, 1994): 201.
(5) Masset, Department Stores, 21.
(6) Ibid., 26.
(7) Rappaport, Halls of Temptation, 61.
(8) Most notably Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999).
