innovation, distinctiveness and the cutting edge for example two recent treatments of london after a fashion, while different in detail, share a structure that moves from district to district in the city, through mayfair, chelsea,soho, camden lock, each an emblematic site of consumption for urban modernity , it has often been the grandest of the grand magasins that have attracted most comment and attention at the expense of the more ordinary the focus of this study is not on the new and remarkable, or on the showy and fashionable, but instead upon a more conventional and even genteel store and the reasons for its decline and closure. throughout much of its history, bourne and hollingsworth deliberately targeted a certain ordinary middle-class clientele, making a virtue of its familiarity homeliness and safety. while bourne and hollingsworth was a particular response to a certain english, and particularly home counties consumer identity, such shops were a vital part of what minght be described as the retail ecology of many major cities in the twentieth century