When the first great department stores opened in Paris and the US in the late 19th century, they were like nothing that had been seen. There were cafés, restaurants and smoking rooms, fountains and winter gardens, luxury goods that customers could browse without being bothered by staff. There were even ladies’ lavatories: women could spend an entire day in town in safety and without moral opprobrium. A glimpse of lifestyles that had previously been available only to the elite was now on view to almost anyone who strolled in.
It’s difficult to reconcile all this with the dying department stores that now loom, unloved, in cities, towns and suburban malls. A walk through central London takes you past the dead hulk of Debenhams on Oxford Street and the soon-to-close former Army & Navy in Victoria. Edinburgh has lost Jenners. It’s perhaps even worse in the US: the ailing JC Penney has closed more than 160 stores, Neiman Marcus has been battling with bankruptcy and restructuring, and other once-mighty names are in trouble. One estimate suggests that 800 US department stores may close during the next five years — roughly half the remaining mall-based total.
The pandemic retail apocalypse has been written about extensively, but what about the architectural losses? While Selfridges has recently been granted a licence to host weddings at its swaggering Edwardian Oxford Street headquarters, as well as experimenting with pop-ups and opening a vegan butcher, Marks and Spencer is demolishing some of its landmark stores and replacing them with generic mixed-use buildings that have little of the flair of the originals. Gems such as the streamlined 1930s Debenhams in Taunton, south-west England, face uncertain futures. The trend appears to be to let these buildings go: just as the retail world has moved on, these cavernous carcasses should be knocked down or gutted to make room for something else.