Today is the opening of the sale of the century at Bourne of Oxford Street. The sale will continue until the final item is cleared from the shelves and the store, a central London landmark since 1902, chose. The closure, the third by leading London department stores since last September, is the latest in the melancholy litany of retailing institutions that have had their day and gone, leaving large freeholds behind like dinosaurs’ bones. Those bones, in particular, are likely to have a brighter future with the approval by the last Great London Council last year outline plans to turn the ‘island’ site into shops, office flats.
The closure of Bourne and Hollingsworth department store, on Oxford Street, in January 1982, following swiftly on the heels of swan and Edgar at Piccadilly Circus and Whiteleys of Bayswater, seemed to many to mark the end of an era in the shopping cultures of the West End of London. The Times was in elegiac mood, mourning the passing of the shop’s genteel, unchallenging consumption culture: ‘Bournes … was one of those gracious institutions, old-fashioned virtually from its inception, known for this infinitely patient service and its policy of benevolent paternalism towards its employees.’ (fig.1) However, the reference to dinosaur bones indicated that this was a way of retailing that many regarded as effectively extinct track in the late-twentieth century.