Beyond Just Looking: Assorted Treasures of the Offline Shopping World

As I sit at my laptop in my kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-study, the room in which, since the start of the Covid pandemic, I have spent most of my time, working, cooking, doing the online shop, and, for a hair-raising period, home-schooling, I have two persistent parallel daydreams. One is about getting back to the grand open spaces of the British Library and its generous, solid, leather-covered desks; the other features an afternoon on the King’s Road, High Street Kensington, Oxford Street, Regent’s Street, Long Acre, or Carnaby Street, wandering from shop to shop, just looking, or trying on the things that catch my eye, judging the quality, cut and hue of garments by the look and feel of them rather than hoping for the best online. Now that shops and libraries have well and truly reopened, these pleasures are within my reach, but I seem to have lost the habit. Rachel Bowlby’s latest book, Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future (Oxford UP, 2022), offers an excellent antidote to this stagnant state. Focusing mainly on the UK over the last two hundred years, Bowlby’s thirty-two short chapters, each celebrating a different aspect of shops, shopping or selling from pedlars to local shops to shopping centres, credit and credibility to customer loyalty, butchers to umbrella shops, demonstrate that these are not things to ‘lose or let go of’; they are vital to our communities, and to the futures of our towns and cities. There is no one better placed to make this case than the author of the ground-breaking Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (1985), as well as Shopping with Freud (1993) and Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2001). One advantage of the broad historical sweep of Bowlby’s study is that it allows her to trace the continuities and crossovers between seemingly distinct periods of shopping history. Practices perceived as quintessentially Rachel Bowlby, Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future, Oxford University Press, 2022, 288 pp, £14.99 hardback, ISBN 9780198815914