Book review:
The Shops: how, why and where to shop
India Knight, Viking, £12.99

Reviewed by John Kampfner
Monday 15th December 2003

I remember returning from Moscow and East Berlin, from the fall of the Wall and the collapse of communism, to the London of the self-indulgent mid-1990s and being overtaken by fury. What on earth drives these people to write mindless articles about shops, restaurants, about what to wear, what not to wear? In the intervening decade, I fear, I have lapsed. I have become a manic shopper.

I shop in particular - and peculiar - ways, but I have grown to like it, to love it. I have to shop on my own. I try to avoid weekends and other busy periods. I have to know what I am looking for (even if I emerge with more than I bargained for). I usually set myself a ten-minute deadline per shop (for my clothes, my wife's clothes or anything else), and I try where possible to keep away from department stores or any place where I can't see out on to the street. I am told this is a very male form of shopping. It is quite mathematical. Possibly it reveals signs of madness. But when it works - and it usually does - it is a highly satisfying experience. It was after this confession one afternoon at the New Statesman office that I, someone who is supposed to obsess about wars and politics, agreed to review three books about shopping.

I didn't think I would find retail communion with India Knight, someone whose newspaper columns would fall into the dippy lifestyle category I so abhor, but there was something curiously appealing about her mini-essays in The Shops: how, why and where to shop (Viking, £12.99). Part of the appeal is purely practical. I confine my online retail therapy to plane tickets and books, so I was grateful for the handy tips on the best internet sites for everything from florists and supermarkets to organic butchers and fishmongers, of which there is such a lamentable dearth in London. She provides a useful "dos and don'ts" of Belgian chocolates (my biggest passion, along with croissants, until I gave them up last May).

Towards the end of The Shops, and a pithy little encyclopaedia it is, she offers help for those whose imagination and originality are in inverse proportion to their spending power, with a carefully tailored list of presents for godchildren of varying ages. The girly facial stuff didn't seem to break new ground (if I see another plug for spas, I really will get cross, or jealous). The book's greatest merit is Knight's advice on locating the items you really need. Such as wigs. Now I also know where to find vestments, reliquaries, chalices, crucifixes and church chairs. The piece de resistance, accompanied by drawings of six dildos in different shapes and sizes, is a page on sex aids mainly for women.

The other two offerings were much more up my street, and less enticing for it. You can tell that London's Shops: the world's emporium by Tara Draper-Stumm and Derek Kendall has been pub-lished by English Heritage (£12.95). It is very safe. It is glossy. It is a coffee- table book. But it is also informative. It distils the history of my two favourite markets - Spitalfields and Columbia Road. It tells me more than I knew, and probably would ever need to know, about two places I look down on to from the top deck of the number 38 bus in Bloomsbury - James Smith & Sons, purveyor of umbrellas and walking sticks for more than a century, and then, farther along the road, Sicilian Avenue, one of London's few uncovered shopping arcades, which I have yet to see anyone actually walk down. The authors are far too polite to juxtapose the beauty of the locations they have chosen with the tat that masquerades as the modern high street shopping experience.

In a similar vein, but more substantial, is English Shops and Shopping by Kathryn A Morrison (Yale University Press, £30). It is what it says it is: an architectural history. But it is also a social history. The book uses the shop to chronicle the development of Britain's towns and cities. It recounts how much of the atmosphere of the West End of London was formed by shops moving out of the City after the Great Fire of 1666. It points to the Victorian development of the department store from the draper's shop, and comes up with observations such as this:


An exhibition-hall-style building, designed to enhance interior display and invite customers to wander about - Emile Zola's image of the cathedral of consumption - did not suit the sales techniques that prevailed in English drapers' shops . . . Into the first quarter of the 20th century, English shoppers continued to be apprehended by shopwalkers, and seated in bentwood chairs at counters where they were attended by well-dressed assistants. They were even escorted ceremoniously from department to department, much to the annoyance of Continental and American visitors, who wished to walk freely around stores.

Fast-forward past the co-operative stores, the penny bazaars, the birth of Marks & Spencer and Boots, to Liberty and Harrods, to the arrival of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and Birmingham's Bull Ring, and you end up at the out-of-town meccas that seem to loom over every horizon. The aerial photograph of the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent resembles a cross between the Pentagon and GCHQ . . . which takes me back into more familiar territory - politics.

Knight concludes with 12 commandments about how to shop: buy online; don't be intimidated by poor service; expensive doesn't necessarily mean good; cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad; there is no such thing as good taste; don't be overambitious; it's the little things that make you happy; set yourself a budget and stick to it; there is no catharsis in the splurge; be organised; shun the big shops; and, finally, enjoy yourself.

"It goes without saying that shopping can be political," Knight writes. "That's the beauty of shopping. It always matters." I'm sure her politics are not my politics. But, then again, we seem to agree on what really matters in life.


This review first appeared in the New Statesman and may not be reproduced without permission.