Jon Honeyball takes a nostalgic trip down memory Tottenham Court Road
What better way to start a wet Saturday morning than driving up Tottenham Court Road in London? This used to be the centre of my technological world: as a teenager, the street was lined with hi-fi shops. Some had aspirations to quality. Others, like Lasky’s, took on the “pile ’em high” approach, and often featured a “wall of sound”, which was a whole wall piled floor to ceiling with loudspeakers. And there was the comparator switch box, which allowed the shop assistant to quickly switch between pairs of speakers, ensuring that the most profitable had the longest play in your brief deluge of noise.
Every vendor could be found somewhere on Tottenham Court Road. Need a particular widget or adapter? Someone stocked it. You might have to walk up and down, diving into shops and doing your best to avoid the onslaught of the hungry sales assistants, but your hunt would be rewarded.
Sometime in the late 1980s, the hi-fi boom passed and the baton was handed over to computing. This was an even richer vein to be mined. I often visited just to see what was on sale. I discovered all sorts of odd utilities on the shelves of Micro Anvika. I loved that shop, and was well known by the staff because I dropped in so often and they were always up for a chat.
Best of all, you could haggle. Find something that you liked, then hem and haw for a few minutes before going next door or the shop further down to see what price they would do. If you were prepared to walk and be firm but polite, there were significant discounts to be had. Remember, this was the era where highstreet computer retailing had meaningful margins. Competition was real, alive and right next door. And if your favoured shop, Micro Anvika in my case, didn’t have what I wanted in stock, they would send a van to collect it from one of their other stores.
As you might expect, Tottenham Court Road was also hugely influential in the photography world. Window after window was filled with gorgeous camera bodies, lenses, flash guns and endless other widgets. It wasn’t really obvious what each thing did, or how you might use them, but the lust value was still immeasurable to a geeky teenage lad.
Today, it’s like walking through a war zone. Shop after shop is shuttered, with tired and tatty display boards over the doors. An endless array of anodyne cookie-cutter chains selling vastly overpriced coffee. A bright sign reassuring me that McDonalds is just three minutes away going north. A road layout designed by a maniac with a fetish for making it as nasty as possible to drive along. A road surface that would make me fear for my life if I were on a motorbike.
In short, the place has died. The charm has gone, the wit and humour, the banter and barter, washed away in a wave of redevelopment and the endless onslaught of the internet.
It’s not hard to see why. On Thursday, I needed to buy a small Bluetooth speaker for a lab test. A couple of mouse clicks in my browser, and it appeared the following morning. I didn’t even need to get out of my seat in Huntingdon. A process that would once have required waiting till the weekend when I would next be in London, a tube train to Tottenham Court Road, a wander along the street, a purchase followed by the trip home, has been replaced by a tensecond finger twitch.
In every conceivable way, the new is better than the old. Faster, cheaper, less effort, easier, larger range, better stock holding, and feet that don’t ache. You don’t have to engage with a spotty 19 year-old with a heroic Clearasil habit, and a level of knowledge that would embarrass a turnip.
Indeed, no one even buys cameras any more unless you are really serious. The world of photography has sunk into a swamp of AIenhanced “selfies” and the truly mind-numbing view that if you don’t have a photo of you at a particular place, you can’t have been there. Cartier-Bresson would be rotating in his grave.
And yet something has gone. We are social animals, and this monster we call internet shopping is dehumanising us at a rate that is both subtle and terrifying. I get no pleasure from my one-click shopping experience, and that is most certainly a downward step. Maybe I shouldn’t expect to enjoy it, and maybe I really had no right to relish the shopping experience when I was younger.
As Joni Mitchell sang, there’s something lost and something found. I’m just not sure the something found is all it’s cracked up to be. To quote another great musician, Roger Waters famously wrote “is there anybody out there?” Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.
This monster we call internet shopping is dehumanising us at a rate that’s both subtle and terrifying
Jon Honeyball is a contributing editor to PC Pro and a geek in the very truest sense of the word. He will never give in to Amazon’s one-click buying button. Email jon@jonhoneyball.com