Department stores are far more than just shops. Their loss leaves a hole in the heart | Polly Toynbee
The demise of Debenhams feels like losing a park or a library. The government could intervene and revive our high streets
Famously, Napoleon is reputed to have issued it as an insult, but Britain was always proud to be “a nation of shopkeepers”. Until now, perhaps. Amid the mudslide of other famous names, the demise of Debenhams leaves not just holes in 124 high streets, but a hole in the heart, too.
Department stores are far more than shops. They belong to the vanishing public realm: they’re intimate yet convivial places to meet, havens for idle browsing, to use toilets or linger in cafes. Their closure feels like losing a park, a library, an arts or leisure centre. A break from shopping in the coffee shop with my mother, nowadays with a daughter, was a rare time to sit and stare at all those other people just like us. One fine word, “haberdashery”, captures their all-encompassing ethos, those button boxes and racks of Sylko cotton reels proving there is no hook-and-eye or curtain ring too small to stock. Arding & Hobbs – pride of Battersea, delight for decades of my life – was later split into a Debenhams, now shut. Every town mourns these lost urban sitting rooms. Where is Hanningtons of Brighton, Lewis’s of Liverpool, or TP Hughes of Tenby? All are engraved on the landscape of local memory.
