Swinging Boutiques and the Modern Store: Designing Shops for Post-war London
Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the cultures of the post-war West End through the design of its retail buildings and shopping streets, considering the designs themselves in addition to the publishing and debates surrounding them in the professional architectural and popular presses. It looks at how the rethinking of the physical fabric and the spaces of the West End's central shopping area was a crucial part of the re-imagining of London's identity by planners and architects in the decades following World War II. It is argued that this new geographical focus of metropolitan planning opened a fresh chapter in the historically problematic relationship between architecture, particularly architectural modernism, and fleeting, feminised consumer cultures. Whilst taking account of continued traditional strands within metropolitan shop design, this research points to the development of two distinct and novel approaches to retail architecture by the 1960s. In the first, the store was conceived as an integral part of the comprehensively developed centre, set amid a rationally planned urban landscape of efficient road grids, pedestrian decks and towering modern office blocks. This was architecture-as-planning, which prioritised spatial concerns and negated the surface. In the second, the shop was an independent element, espousing an ephemeral, even provisional, architecture of surface. This form was epitomised by the fashionable boutiques of 'swinging' London which camped out in the lower storeys of old buildings within London's historic street patterns. These shops were supremely 'of the moment', yet also very much in tune with the West End's well established fashionable consumption cultures.