The other day I walked past Patisserie Valerie on the corner of Broadwick Street and Marshall Street, in a shop that used to be a potter’s. ‘This isn’t really Patisserie Valerie,’ I thought to myself. What I had always taken to be a proper name (of a place in Old Compton Street, after its move from Frith Street, where it had been bombed in the war) had now become a common noun (a chain).
Luke Johnson, who runs Risk Capital Partners Ltd, the owners of the Patisserie Valerie chain, is not entirely to blame for this, since a few branches had opened before he took it over in 2006. And to tell the truth, I didn’t much mind Valerie becoming a chain, since I’d stopped going to the real one, in favour of Maison Bertaux or sometimes Amato. But it made me realise how much is tied up in knowing a single place with a name.
In ‘A Painful Case’, a story in Dubliners, Joyce writes of the antihero Duffy: ‘He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort Terrace.’ Earlsfort Terrace sounds, to an ignoramus, more like a private house than a concert hall. It means less to me even than a reference to the Queen’s Hall in London, which I never knew before its destruction after a performance of the ‘Dream of Gerontius’, on 10 May 1941. But say ‘The Wigmore Hall’ and you establish in my mind a whole personality that includes a type of audience and the rather ghastly half-dome by Gerald Moira over the platform.
This is the benefit and danger for writers who use proper names as portmanteaux for a little world. They can change, or they can disappear. To me Whiteleys means a department store, as it did to Wagner when he came to visit it, not a soulless shell of a shopping arcade only redeemed by Rowley Leigh’s Café Anglais. Something similar applies to Elliston & Cavell in Oxford.
The decay of proper places and the proliferation of common chains seems to be accelerating. I found Smith’s snuff shop in Charing Cross Road had closed this week, not surprisingly perhaps, though I thought it could hang on. I hope Smith’s the umbrella shop does. It wouldn’t do as a chain.
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