The razzle-dazzle of our lost department stores

Have you started Christmas shopping? Then pause a moment to recall the glamour of department stores of the past. Tessa Boase has been rifling through archives of such sites for her new book; here are just eight of the fun facts she’s uncovered 

It’s like losing a dignified friend: the shock, on walking down the high street, to discover the windows of a once-cherished department store have been boarded up. Or, worse, that it’s morphed overnight into something unseemly.

We’ve lost an astonishing 83% of our department stores in the past six years. A 2022 report by SAVE Britain’s Heritage found 237 former stores sitting empty and purposeless, evidence of the seismic shift in our shopping habits. It seems inconceivable that old, established independents, such as Jenners of Edinburgh, founded in 1838, or Boswells of Oxford, trading since 1738 and the second-oldest department store in the world, have shut their doors for good.

How it used to be; shopping at Morgan Squire in Leicester 

When the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic began to pick off our remaining department stores, it seemed like a pivotal moment in history; a time to take stock. We are losing them as physical places to shop, but we’re also losing their history. Witness the immense Debenhams archive, currently in emergency storage with no public access, its fate uncertain.

And it’s within archives such as that of Debenhams that gems of stories lie. Here are eight quirky facts I’ve discovered on my search for tales of those shopping titans of our past…

An illustration of the buzzing beauty salon at DH Evans

1. The first Christmas Grotto was conceived by JR Roberts of Stratford in 1888. It put Santa in a darkened cavern lit by magic lanterns and 17,000 children visited. In 1909, twice as many visitors queued to glimpse Blériot’s monoplane, reassembled inside Selfridges just 24 hours after its historic flight over the English Channel.

2. On Piccadilly, the new-look Swan & Edgar (third rebuild, 1927) once offered a service to reduce the girth of ladies’ ankles while their beloveds waited in a ‘reading room for husbands’.

3. The world’s oldest department store? Fortnum & Mason, founded in 1707.

4. The Lamson Pneumatic Tube System, whereby cash payments were whizzed to a cash office and change returned, all via tube, required 15 to 18 miles of tubing for a large department store.

5. Some department stores were so much more than a shop. By 1911 Harrods boasted a ladies’ rifle team, an athletics association, an in-house magazine and an amateur dramatics society.

6. Department stores vied with each other for spectacular attractions. In 1930 Chiesmans of Lewisham even thrilled (or alarmed?) shoppers with ‘Vixen, the untamed lioness’.

7. When Simpsons of Piccadilly opened in 1936, it featured a floor of tailors, cutters and pressers working in full view of customers.

8. In 1937 Bentalls of Kingston lured crowds to its glass atrium with a female stunt diver.

Intrigued? Discover more in the full feature on this story in the latest issue of The Arts Society Magazine.

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About the author

Tessa Boase is an Arts Society Accredited Lecturer, a journalist for national newspapers and magazines and an author. Her latest book, just published by Safe Haven Books, is London’s Lost Department Stores: A Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams