Speculation over the future shape of the John Lewis Partnership has once more brought into sharp focus the prospects of the physical retail sector in general and the Department Store in particular. Despite often occupying prime sites in the centres of cities and towns, their fortunes are in sharp decline, CoStar revealing in August 2021 that with the collapse of BHS, the closure of Debenhams, and the restructuring of other companies, the number of major department stores in the UK had fallen by 83% from 467 in 2016 to seventy-nine. This trend shows no sign of abating.

While William Fortnum and Hugh Mason opened their eponymous store at 181, Piccadilly in 1707 and William Clark his shop at 44, Wigmore Street before bringing William Debenham in as a partner in 1813, they were originally a grocery store and a draper’s respectively, only becoming department stores in the 19^th century. The man who developed the department store concept, Anthony Harding, is barely remembered and his store, Harding, Howell’s & Co Grand Fashionable Magazine, ceased trading over 170 years ago.

Founded in 1789 and located in Schomberg House on Pall Mall, now the site of the RAC Club, it was aimed at the newly affluent middle-class woman, offering them the opportunity to shop for a wide range of goods without the inconvenience of walking chaperoned from one shop to another on the public highway. Designed to be as attractive and enticing as possible, it featured glass chandeliers, tall ceilings from which fabrics were hung and large glass-fronted cases in which merchandise was displayed.

The ground floor was divided by glass partitions into four departments. The first, immediately by the entrance, Ackerman’s Repository of Arts enthused in 1809, was “exclusively appropriated to the sale of furs and fans. The second contains haberdashery of every description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves etc. In the third…you meet with a rich assortment of jewellery, ornamental articles in ormolu, French clocks etc, and on the left, with all the different kinds of perfumery necessary for the toilette”.

The fourth department contained millinery, dresses, and textiles, especially chintzes and their accessories. There was “no article of female attire or decoration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion”, the article concluded. “The present proprietors have spared neither trouble nor expense to ensure the establishment of a superiority over every other in Europe, and to render it perfectly unique in its kind”.

Neither did Harding forget his customers’ creature comforts. After ascending the Schomberg’s magnificent painted staircase to the second floor, the first given over to workrooms employing around forty staff, the shopper found Mr Cosway’s breakfast room. “Wines, teas, coffee, and sweetmeats” were available for consumption and the café offered a pleasant environment in which to compare purchases and catch up on the latest tittle-tattle. A “noble apartment [was] used as a shawl room” and, perhaps most importantly, there were public toilets, a rare convenience for women at the time.