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The big idea: why going shopping is due a comeback


Bring back raucous changing rooms and friendly smiles – things you can’t buy online

We have bypassed the bus ride into town, stepped back from the revolving doors and escalators, silenced the tinkle of muzak, skipped the exchange of smiles and niceties with sales assistants, forgotten what it feels like to journey home from the chase with shopping bags tucked next to tired legs. London’s Big Topshop at Oxford Circus, where teenage girls once screamed like Swifties as Kate Moss strutted and posed in the shop window like a festival headliner, is still boarded up, beached like a vast blue whale two and a half years after Ikea announced it had bought the site. When Harry Gordon Selfridge opened his lavish central London store in 1909 – one of Émile Zola’s “great cathedrals of shopping” – he brought showmanlike flair to the British high street, installing a shooting range and an ice rink on the roof.

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