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.
This article tracks the rise and, particularly, the fall of Bourne and Hollingsworth in the twenty century. In so doing it offers a distinctive perspective on metropolitan consumption cultures. Particularly when considering major global centers of consumption, or ‘fashion’s world cities’, there has a focus on innovation, distinctiveness and the cutting edge. For example, two recent treatments of London’s modern fashion, and shopping cultures, Christopher Breward’s Fashioning London, and Alistair O’Neill’s 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 distinctively new combinations of fashion retailing, consumption and performance. In the literature on the significance 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 the showy and fashionable, but instead upon a more conventional and even ‘genteel’ store and the reason 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 shop were a vital part of what might be described as the retail ecology many major cities in the twenty century.