Our concentration on single store is more than just a simple case study; it enable us to analysis the intersection of different dimension of the history of metropolitan consumption. Bourne and Hollingsworth can be treated as an example of specific kind of consumption culture, one that typified a certain mode of shopping that comprised a distinctive set of shopping practices, associated whit particular forms of consumer identity and ‘shopping geogra-phies’. Bourne and Hollingsworth may also be understood as material space, both as building designed and refurbished by tis owners, management, architects and shopfitters, and as a particular site within the routes and flows of the West End. Bourne and Hollingsworth can also be treated as a particular kind of firm; in this case family-owned, broadly paternalistic towards its work-force, and with a strong sense of its place in the market and the geographies of the West End. Finally Bourne and Hollingsworth can understood as urban property, as a distinctive form of capital asset in the city. This last dimension is vital to the story to be told here. There is no simple and singular cause of the demise of Bourne and Hollingsworth, but we want to point towards the complex interaction between the cultures of consumption, retail business practices and the working of metropolitan property markets, particularly in the period between 1960 and early 1980s.
This focus on the multi-dimensional character of a single department store speaks directly to recent concerns within Geog-raphy more generally about the relations between the cultural and the economic, which have emphasised their foundamental insepa-rability, with some heralding the ‘rise of Cultural Economic Geography.