19th August 2018

When, one year ago, we were speeding back to Birmingham, I had visions of shopping in all those giant department stores of my youth: Lewis’s, Rackham’s, Grey’s, Debenham’s etc. But this week Rackham’s successor, the glam House of Fraser, was taken over for a song by Sports Direct, and the others seem to have simply disappeared. Oh how I used to love swanning around, spraying the expensive perfumes when the exquisitely-groomed sales girls weren’t looking. France, of course, more or less invented le grand magasin. If you read Zola’s novel Au bonheur des Dames (a paradise for ladies), you’ll see that in 1860 Paris he based his story on the original Le bon marche superstore, which itself put local market stalls out of business. But now? Birmingham is to introduce a new expensive pollution tax for city centre shoppers arriving by car, marking the death knell of traditional city centre shopping. Despite the Chancellor vowing to redress the tax burden between store and internet sales, buying stuff from Amazon just won’t be the same somehow. Sigh.