Nostalgia for the bustling high street is misplaced

Every Christmas the proportion of money we spend online escalates. This year probably more than a third of all our festive gifts and food will be sourced via the internet. With this will go the usual hand-wringing about consumerism causing neighbourhoods to become clogged up with delivery vans and the death of our high street.

If you think calls to boycott Amazon and entreaties to shop local are a new phenomenon, think again. In 1888, a Tunbridge Wells vicar implored his flock to support the town’s shopkeepers, for ‘the weight of goods arriving at our local stations for private people far exceeds that for the tradesmen’. He was bemoaning the boom in mail order, which flourished in late Victorian Britain thanks to the emergence of the railways and clever retailers. Barratts of Northampton, which still makes shoes, developed the Footshape brand, a gimmick whereby people could draw around their feet and send the picture with their order to ensure the right size. Is this really so different from Bershka, the fashion retailer, recently launching an AI-powered ‘see how it fits on me’ app for people shopping on their phones at home?

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The growth in catalogue retailing, the lack of town-centre lavatories, issues with parking (either one’s horse, carriage or car), fussy consumers, rip-off salesmen and moral panic about consumerism – these are concerns that stretch back to when medieval town authorities installed a market cross in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, so that shoppers ‘might think upon their dear Saviour which died for them upon the Crosse’ and ‘rogues and cozeners may look upon it and cease them of their guile’.