The ‘chain store’ has often been condemned by architectural historians for eroding local distinctiveness and for responding neither to context nor to local and regional building materials and styles. In 1955, The Architectural Review published the now-famous ‘Outrage’ essay by Ian Nairn, in which he recounted his journey by car from Southampton to Carlisle, visiting major towns along the route. He complained about the ‘nowhere sprawl’ that he found, reducing ‘all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern’. Subsequent critics have talked about ‘clone-town UK’, where high streets have become ‘bland identikit places dominated by a few bloated retail behemoths’.
Bravely, Kathryn Morrison’s new book Chain Stores in the Golden Age of the British High Street (see ‘Further reading’ below) dares to challenge this orthodoxy and argues that the story is much richer than that. The notion that shopping streets have become indistinguishable, one from the other, became something of an architectural historians’ trope as early as 1907, she says; one that mistakenly conflates retail uniformity with architectural uniformity.
The rise of multiple retailing
The story of the transformation of the High Street into a land of chains rather than of independent retailers begins in the late 1820s. Banks were among the first of the nation’s business concerns to begin opening multiple branches. Another pioneer was the East India Tea Company, though initially the company established retail agencies throughout the country, rather than owning their own outlets.
The salt sellers