High streets today are full of ghosts
When I was a little girl, we used to have a pot of tea and toasted teacake in British Home Stores. It was a reward at the end of a long, footsore afternoon for traipsing round after my mother and grandmother through a forest of frocks. The most exciting thing that happened in British Home Stores (it was never BHS back then) was the fright you got from touching a crimplene shirtwaister so full of static it could stand up by itself. Ah, those were the days, when you could wear a brushed nylon nightie to a bed covered in bri-nylon sheets and an electric shock was guaranteed.
The demise of BHS has prompted an outpouring of nostalgia. The name had a sturdy pride redolent of Empire, but it was really the poor man’s Debenhams, and Debenhams is the poor man’s John Lewis. People like a bargain, but they don’t like poor.
Once there was C&A, which seemed more “with it”, as my mum would say, but that, too, went to the great mall in the sky. Littlewoods, where I had my first job in Ladies Underwear, disappeared a few years back. The late Richard Shops is where I bought the grey flannel midi that I wore to my university interview in 1978 and that made me look like a nun on the run.
You know, I still find myself thinking I must pop into Woolworths. Nothing has filled the joyful, pick’n’mix gap that was left when the wonder of Woolies was extinguished in 2009. Can we have it back, please?
I have measured out my life with chain stores. Soon women of my age will wander down the high street and see only ghosts.
It is not BHS we mourn, it is the memory of our long-lost selves.