“Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street

• Read more | A history of the high street

Alongside the quotidian stuff, high streets have always been relatively prestigious areas for leisure shopping, featuring the likes of jewellers, swordsmiths, clockmakers and lace merchants. Luxury goods such as these are often imports, so they can tell you a lot about Britain’s place in a global context.

Take tea for example: it was first sold in china shops, then in high-end grocers, then – as it became cheaper – everywhere. Just following the journey of tea reveals so much about the way in which people interacted with the global landscape of commercialisation.

When did a cluster of shops that we might recognise as a high street first appear in British towns?

The evolution of the high street was a really gradual process. The market was still the most important place to shop – certainly for the working classes – well into the 20th century. Market day was always the busiest day in town.

But between 1650 and 1750, most towns in Britain begin to have some fixed shops, usually around or leading from the market. One of the first types of shop to move into fixed premises was the butcher. That kept mess away from the main shopping area, and enabled butchers to lock up stock and install cold stores.

• Read more | A brief history of shopping

Traditionally, the market square was also a gathering place – somewhere people went to enjoy entertainment, to jeer at criminals in the stocks or to hear political proclamations. Slowly, these aspects became features of the high street, too. It was where you’d find sex workers, beggars, people ranting on street corners, hustlers drumming up custom for the bear fight being held the next day – that kind of thing.

In my book, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street, I argue that the high street isn’t just about shops. It’s a place for the community to come together.

What items have been enduring staples of the high street?

The most significant products sold there have been clothing and food, but the ways those things are sold have changed hugely. In 1700, a typical grocer would offer raisins, dried ginger and spices, but it would also sell you a couple of nails and maybe a bit of cloth as well.

Gradually, shops became more and more specialised. In the 19th century, high-end grocers emerged calling themselves ‘Italian warehouses’. They sold Italian products such as olive oil and jars of preserves, but also the name just sounded more exotic. Then, in the second half of the 19th century, chain grocers such as Lipton’s, the Maypole Dairy and Home & Colonial were established to serve the lower end of the market.

In my book, I argue that the high street isn’t just about shops. It’s a place for the community to come together

When the first Sainsbury’s shop opened in Drury Lane, London in 1869, it sold only eggs, milk and butter. There was a lot of money to be made in these early chain grocers, many of which sold just a small range of products. By the postwar period, multiple chain grocers were operating, including Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose, all expanding their offering on high streets.

Then Britain saw the rise of the out-of-town supermarket – which is modelled on the market, only supersized – and the start of a move away from food shopping on the high street.

What are some of the most interesting high street shops now lost to time?

The fabric shop is a fascinating example of something that has all but disappeared. The story of clothing on the high street began with the sale of cloth, then cut cloth, then almost ready-to-wear – then, finally, truly ready-to-wear clothing. That final step didn’t really happen until the 20th century. Even when I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a popular chain of fabric shops called Gordon Thoday; I remember my mum spending hours in one.

Just within my lifetime, fabric shops have virtually vanished from the high street, apart from some very small independent outlets. I think that if you told someone from 160 years ago, or even 60 years ago, that today we all buy off-the-peg clothes in randomly assigned sizes, they would have been flabbergasted.

• Read more | Beauty before durability: the interwar beginnings of fast fashion

There was also a level of real specialism on the high street that I think we’ve now lost. You might have a lawnmower shop next door to a piano shop next to the oil man, who sold oil paints and different types of oils for cooking or fuel. It’s very rare to find really specialist shops anymore, especially given modern rent pressures.

That said, one of the success stories of the past few years is the bookshop. Booksellers have always been prevalent, and in the early days of the high street they were a mark of a well-appointed town. People would stroll past to look at the prints in the window, each one displayed in its own pane of glass.

Booksellers were usually printers, too. Inside you could tell them which book or collection of poems or sermons you’d like, and then you would choose your own binding. Some booksellers would also operate as circulating libraries. These were quite relaxed, exclusive spaces where you could sit and browse. Leisure was very much built into the whole experience, and bookshops embraced the idea of shopping as a pleasure to really lean into.

When did shopping become seen as a leisure activity rather than just another chore?

It always has been, to some extent. Even before the 17th century, if you were wealthy you would delegate the task of going to the market, but you might still go along to a selling fair. A lot of those still exist in a changed form: think of the Goose Fair in Nottingham, or the Midsummer Fair in Cambridge.

Today these are big entertainment events with rollercoasters and candyfloss, but when founded they were international selling fairs. They would last up to a week, and you would spend a lot of time discussing possible purchases, which would be brought out and spread before you to inspect. You might even have salespeople come to your home.

The idea that you would go out to spend a day just having fun shopping in town really took off in the late-17th and early 18th century – and it caused a lot of concern at the time. Many people hated the idea of browsing – a notion that, unsurprisingly, was widely associated with women. Quite clearly, men were just as guilty, but women were the ones who took the flack.

It was known as ‘tumbling’, in reference to women who would grab at bolts of cloth, tumbling the fabric all over the place without buying anything. Shopping was seen as a game into which you entered with whoever was selling. Most places didn’t have fixed prices until the mid-18th century, so you needed to bargain. Trying to get a good price – to get the better of the shopkeeper, as it were – was treated as a kind of intellectual exercise.

Napoleon supposedly called Britain a “nation of shopkeepers”. How have shopkeepers been regarded over time?

For much of history, shopkeepers were not regarded as society’s most upstanding members. If you go back to the medieval period, there was a really strong idea that you should shop directly from the producer, often a farmer – which all sounds very idyllic and organic and local. But, even back then, that idea was utter rubbish.

• Read more | The medieval marketplace: a time traveller’s guide to shopping in the Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, there were people buying stuff from producers, then selling it on. Such on-sellers were widely hated, considered immoral and profiteering. Gradually, people began to realise that producers aren’t necessarily very good at selling, and that maybe people who are really good at making cheese should just make really good cheese, while a specialised salesperson, perhaps with a network of agents, should sell that cheese.

People came to appreciate that, though there might be a bit of profit in on-selling, those profits ultimately find their way into the system, so it’s quite good for the economy overall.

What can you tell us about the rise of the department store?

The concept is not actually very old. It was only from the 1860s onwards that the ‘Big Shop’ – a brilliantly descriptive term – emerged on the high street. Such establishments weren’t called ‘department stores’; when that term did start to be used, it was a pejorative Americanism for something that was seen as a bit shabby and downmarket.

A lot of the early Big Shops evolved out of other, more specialist shops that just started selling additional items. For example, mercers originally sold only silk, but then many mercers became drapers, then the drapers started to sell furniture, then carpets and clothes and homewares. They might move into ready-to-wear, and add some toys, and perhaps an entire house-fitting service. Then, before you knew it, you had yourself a Big Shop.

It was only from the 1860s onwards that the ‘Big Shop’ emerged on the high street. Such establishments weren’t called ‘department stores’... that term was a pejorative Americanism for something that was seen as a bit shabby and downmarket

A lot of the early Big Shops extended into adjacent premises, ending up with a real mishmash of buildings. When department stores became established, they often sported glorious, usually neoclassical frontages that you could spot a mile away: think big columns, huge atriums with multiple floors, and massive windows. Many department stores also had staff quarters on the top floor, because the shop assistants would live in.

The idea of the window display was really driven by department stores. Selfridges displayed a monoplane, and Lewis’s of Liverpool placed a hand excavated from Pompeii in its window. Another innovative sales technique introduced by department stores was the big marketing stunt.

• Read more | What can the streets of Pompeii reveal about daily life in ancient Rome?

Gordon Selfridge – very brash, very American – was well known for this. He thought British high streets were incredibly backward, and even had the law changed in order to build his massive store on Oxford Street. But the golden age of the big department store stunt was the interwar period.

Bentalls in Kingston upon Thames was great at such affairs. When the first hoover was launched, a giant hoover was installed in its atrium. On another occasion, it had a Swedish diver called Anita Kittner plunge from the mezzanine into a tiny swimming pool five storeys below. The floor had to be reinforced because of the velocity with which she hit that pool. Alarmingly, she lost her swimming costume on the way down.

Other stores would hold cookery demonstrations, and catwalk shows were common up until the 1970s. It was all about bringing people in through the door, making the department store a hub for more than just shopping.

What refreshments were on offer for hungry shoppers?

As they are today, refreshments have always been a huge part of the high-street experience. In the modern context, I’m not fond of a chain cafe, but it’s important to acknowledge that early examples were crucial to the development of the high street.

Take Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms. Cocoa was traditionally associated with institutional living – workhouses, hospitals – and Lockhart’s was squarely aimed at the poor. You could bring your own food, and sit in one all day. So I think they deserve an honourable mention, though I wouldn’t necessarily want to go and spend all day there, sipping cocoa and eating a sausage.

• Read more | 9 ways our food shopping habits have changed since 1947

Some street-seller offerings from the past are really interesting, too – things such as saloop. Very few people in Britain today have heard of saloop, but it’s still a popular drink in the Middle East [where it’s now commonly called salep]. Made from powdered orchid root, it’s a pick-me-up that was frequently served on street corners in 18th-century Britain. So I think a mug of saloop would have been worth stopping for.

What debates about high streets have raged over the centuries?

People have always been concerned about the high street. First of all, they were worried that shopping was immoral, and that everyone would waste their hard-earned money. Then, when shops became more established and we all realised that we loved them, concerns shifted to the issue of small shopkeepers being driven out of business by Big Shops. People have been arguing over that since at least the 1850s.

In the early 20th century, the debate focused on the ‘death of the grocer’ – the idea that small-scale specialist grocers would be forced under by Big Shops with food halls and unskilled workers. That took a lot longer than people at the time thought it would, but it has undeniably happened.

The class aspect – whether a high street is being gentrified or is in slow decline – has long been a topic of debate. Ethically, too, there are many choices to make when shopping, because another argument that has raged forever concerns the treatment of producers. There was a huge boycott of slave-produced sugar from the late 18th century, while in the 1890s people were concerned about dressmakers being worked to the bone.

We still have debates today about working conditions and modern slavery in terms of how our products are made.

Many people have talked about the ‘death of the high street’. Should we be worried?

I think we should bear in mind the idea of ‘use it or lose it’, but actually I believe there’s more hand-wringing than there needs to be. So long as we still have a community hub, it might not be such a bad thing if the high street constricts.

I do think, though, that we would definitely lose something if our high streets disappeared entirely – and modern surveys reveal that 98 per cent of the population agrees with me. We can’t turn back the clock, but even though we’ve got fewer shops now, history shows us that all previous predictions about the disappearance of the high street have been confounded.

Annie Gray is a historian, cook, broadcaster and writer specialising in the history of food and dining in Britain since around 1600. Her latest book is The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street (Profile Books, 2024)

This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine