1936 On the Continent

its salt can collect the best of the wares in which it deals, and the old wholesale thoroughfares like Mincing Lane have been replaced by shopping districts that have an ever-increasing public which can with ever-increasing ease transport itself from its home, whether a mansion in the country or a flat in the suburbs, to its chosen centre of shopping.
A Bird’s-eye View of London Shops
    Those who take a bird’s-eye view of London can see how saddlers congregate in St. Martin’s Lane; motor-cars (successors to carriages) in Long Acre; auctioneers and picture-dealers in St. James’s; and all of them tending to move westward, till we have motor-cars in Great Portland Street and St. James’s Street.
    You can take another view of London. You can try and divide it into a map of its own interests. The rich in Mayfair and St. James’s; artists in Chelsea (oil and colourmen, picture-frames, and the makers of the picture which require these);the theatre-world of Shaftesbury Avenue (with costumes, band instruments; and, it may be added, the clothings and shoeings which belong to these professions); club-land in Pall Mall and St. James’s (tobacconists, hatters, wine merchants); and all the engrossing shops which gather round the British Museum, whether you are interested in mummies, books on genealogy, an amber necklace which proudly announces that every bead encloses a fly, or merely on having lunch on a rickety table in a space overcrowded by people who want to eat cereals in no comfort at all.
    These are very well served, very good meals for those who take feeding as an offshoot of learning.
Big and Little Stores
    The tendency to-day is towards the big stores, because they offer the greatest profit for the least effort. They have classified the needs of the country as Foreign Offices classify the needs of different nationalities. Each of them has a good selection of everything from socks to typewriters, from dictionaries to cake.
    It is easy to give a list of big shopping centres of this kind, but it must not be forgotten that there is also a prevalence of “little men.” Nearly every household has its own workman, whether a handy-man or a working-tailor or working-watchmaker in the district, which it regards as its own special discovery. With men they tend to be purveyors of food or drink (“I get them from a little fellow behind St. Martin’s Lane”). With women they are usually dressmakers (“I have a wonderful woman who runs up things for me in Earl’s Court”). The upper classes in London still cling to the idea that it is better (even perhaps more ethical) to go to a privately owned small shop than to a big branch store. In some cases this leads to a ramp, as with the small “old-fashioned” chemist, whose prices are double those of the figures of the great multiple store, though his materials may be exactly the same.
London’s Mixture
    London may look like a mixture, as all foreign towns look like a mixture, to those who are coming to it for the first time, or even for the seventh or eighth time, if theyhave no guide. But a map to London, properly coloured, as maps should be, would tell everybody where to go for what they want.
Men’s Shopping
    The male shopping district is roughly a square which, taken from Pall Mall on the south, St. James’s on the east, and the Haymarket on the west, and, turned into a pentagon on the north, covers the district enclosed by Regent Street and Oxford Street, turning down again along South Molton Street.
    This covers a stretch of country rich in historical traditions of the well-dressed man, the cultured man, and that exacting pair, the clubman and the collector. It even covers the reading man, because the London Library is situated in St. James’s Square.
    In one way you cannot claim this district as a shopping district; there are too many clubs in it, and restaurants, and libraries, and then some more clubs.
    But, on the whole, this is the man’s shopping district. Like every other vigorous ground, growing things instead of being sterile, it cannot be wholly limited. It has shoots. Up to the north the male shopper, whether he be a newcomer or an old-timer, will find what he wants in Savile Row, in Bond Street, or in the Burlington Arcade. These three thoroughfares (with apologies to the Burlington Arcade, since it is no such thing as a thoroughfare), represent what one may call an overflow from the intense male-furnishing of Piccadilly down to Pall