For the last couple of years there has been a large yellow sign on the corner of Selfridge’s on London’s Oxford Street that reads: “Let’s Change the Way we Shop.” Walk a few hundred yards in either direction on “Britain’s high street” and you discover evidence that a large proportion of Oxford Street’s 200 million annual pre-pandemic customers have already taken up that invitation, abandoning department stores for the internet.
The idea of shopping as a leisure pursuit was invented here in the 1800s. The wide Georgian pavements, plate glass shopfronts and newfangled street lights encouraged browsers to stand “six people deep” to genteely lust after spotlit millinery or pyramids of fruit. Jane Austen was an early adherent of retail therapy, guiltily admitting in a letter to once spending £5 on an Oxford Street trip – about £500 today.
