In the 1980s you could still visit a city in Britain or Ireland and expect to see unfamiliar shops
HAPPY STUPID Christmas. Most of you will have bought all your gifts weeks ago. A few admirable people will, however, be hoping that the garage is still open this afternoon. After all, what says “Christmas” more eloquently than two jars of Nutella and a sack of cat litter?
Either way, depressingly few of your purchases will have been made in the sort of shop you see in Dickens adaptations. You know the type. They’ve got names like Mr Pundlechook’s Novelty Emporium and Sudbury and Sudbury’s Victuallers. Each right angle in the multi-paned window glistens with picturesque snow.
A cheery, rubicund man wraps the purchases in brown paper and (without triggering any calls to social services) pinches every available baby on his or her plump cheek.
The few places that do still meet this description tend to be vanity projects run by the idle mistresses of dissolute millionaires. How has that vulgar shop selling dog soap stayed in business? Don’t ask, darling.
Anyway, too much actual shopping – as opposed to the virtual online sort – takes place in one class of chain store or another. A Bucket o’ Sox from Marks and Spencer, a vat of sherry from Tesco, one of the late Mr Jobs’s tablets from PC World – the retail empires’ grip is becoming ever tighter and ever more unyielding. All this happened relatively recently.
In the 1980s you could still visit a city in Britain or Ireland and reasonably expect to see a variety of unfamiliar shops. Belfast, for example, had two venerable department stores: Anderson and McAuley and Robinson and Cleaver. These were the sorts of places where shiny-headed men, tape measures draped ceremonially over shoulders, were permanently on hand to estimate inside legs or assess hat sizes. Actual waitresses served grey, astringent coffee in moderately elegant cafes.
Robinson and Cleaver passed away in 1984. Anderson and McAuley perished a decade later. The usual parade of familiar chain stores stands in their place.
Such is the dulling of the high street that whole towns now seem cloned from a dreary specimen kept in an evil genius’s hidden lair. In 2004, the New Economics Foundation, a British think tank, published a report entitled Clone Town Britain.
According to this terrifying document, nearly half the towns in the UK can be classed as clones. Travel to such a place and, likely as not, you can buy your razor from Boots, your coffee from Starbucks and your newspaper from WH Smith.
The situation seems a little less frightening in Ireland. Outside the Pale, a degree of variety still exists. It is, in many rural towns, still (just about) possible to buy trousers from the class of store that allows a fat orange cat to doze in the front window.
Most of central Dublin, however, now looks like most of Leeds, most of Birmingham or most of Glasgow.
Starbucks’ faux hippie coffee store – music by generic bores such as the supernaturally soporific Jack Johnson – now allows Spanish students to drink the same consistently average product in every city they invade.
A degree of drab, tolerable uniformity is available to every citizen of the western world. Even Karl Marx didn’t see that coming.
Depressing news from London triggered these depressing musings. If, like this correspondent, you have spent any time working in and about Soho you will, almost certainly, have noticed an excellent establishment named Gaby’s Deli on the Charing Cross Road.
Still run by the estimable Gaby Elyahou, the cafe serves a fine line in salt beef, falafels and fresh salads. Signed photographs of celebrities line the walls.
Established nearly 50 years ago, Gaby’s has achieved the status of an institution without any concomitant stuffiness or complacency. No sane planner would, surely, allow such a fine establishment to perish. Well, you can probably guess where this column is heading.
A few months ago Gascoyne Holdings, the Marquess of Salisbury’s property company, announced that it planned to evict Gaby’s in order to install (here it comes) some sort of restaurant chain. It’s not a matter of great importance. If – despite support from celebrities such as Simon Callow and Vanessa Redgrave – the campaign to save Gaby’s fails and Le Restaurant Générique moves in, Londoners will still remain fed,
Big Ben will keep chiming and ravens will continue to visit the Tower of London, but some tributary of the Rubicon will have been crossed. The place is popular. It is distinctive. It adds character to a city that, like Dublin, is increasingly looking like Anywhere Else Megapolis.