The glamour and romance of London’s vanished department stores

There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores. First, to Mile End, to see the tiny Georgian building bang in the middle of the pillared façade of what used to be Wickhams and is now Tesco and Sports Direct. During Wickhams’s 1920s expansion, one neighbour, a German clockmaker called Otto Spiegelhalter, simply refused to budge, whatever the financial offer. He eventually agreed to sell his garden so that the store could expand round the back of him. But there, dwarfed by the clock tower, his two-storey house still stands, a monument to stubbornness.

Next, Khan’s Bargains in Peckham Rye, which used to be Holdrons, ‘the Pride of Rye Lane’s Golden Mile’, to which 1930s children flocked to see the largest model railway display in Europe. The photographs in this charming book show us not only Khan’s bargains, which look tempting, but also the man, Akbar Khan, who arrived from Afghanistan in 1999 and is now ‘on a mission to help get more traders involved in preserving Peckham’s architectural heritage’. Well done him. Above his head you can see the Art Deco vaulted ceiling made of ‘lenscrete’ (concrete dotted with a thousand glass lenses) from Holdrons’s 1930s rebuild. The building is a modernist gem.

You’ll need a robust constitution to read this chronicle of the rise, decline and death of the family-run department store without weeping. These proud establishments might have been rabbit-warren-like if you were on the second floor searching for the soft furnishings, but they were also strangely glamorous, with their doormen and their staircase halls. The excitement of visiting one with one’s mother was a defining aspect of countless childhoods. The owners knew that if they ensnared children they would hold on to them as customers for life.