Last October I had a stroke of good luck, in that I was fortunate enough to win one of the £100 prizes which my work were awarding in a draw for those people who recorded 100% attendance in the previous three months. The only snag was that said prize- to keep it within Inland Revenue rules and therefore non-taxable- came in the form of shopping vouchers, usable at a selection of well-known shops and places of recreation. So- what to do with the loot? It has to be said that only the previous month I’d been given another £50 consolation prize for being a runner-up in the organisation’s Community Award and only with difficulty decided to blow the lot on all seven seasons of The West Wing, so while it was tempting to saunter into HMV and blow the lot on more DVDs, or to spend a couple of hours in Waterstone’s putting together my reading for the next couple of years, it would also have felt like a waste of money considering that I already have enough unwatched DVDs to take me comfortably through to this time next year. The solution, as it happened, came a couple of weeks later; having met Mother at the coach station in Leeds one Saturday, we were walking through the city centre and ready for something to eat when we passed Debenhams and decided to give their cafe a go. On the way up, my eye was caught by some of the china, and on the way down, full of a very acceptable tomato and mozzarella panini, I also noticed the bedding and towels, so that the following morning I went back and availed myself of a Denby teapot which I love very much, a new set of towels in a rather extroverted turquoise and a spare bedsheet to take the total over £60 (because the vouchers were in £20 denominations and they don’t give change). Before heading home I also called in HMV and bought the complete Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series on DVD, but by that stage I could justify it to myself.

When you think about it, the department store is such a wonderful idea that it seems such a shame that apart from a couple of well-known names, they seem to be in more or less terminal decline. Leeds has - apart from the first Harvey Nichols outside London- a Debenhams and a House of Fraser, but when the Lewis’s chain which formerly traversed the North was broken up, the Leeds one was bought by Allders and closed down a couple of years ago, still referred to by most locals as Lewis’s to the end. No longer does Bradford have Busby’s, or the wonderfully named Brown, Muff & Co, and what used to be Blacker’s in Liverpool is now (in no particular order) a McDonald’s, a KFC, a Wetherspoons pub and a disused cinema. In my childhood, Blacklers always used to have a giant Father Christmas figure which stood in the centre of the store and reached almost to the roof- when I was about five, it seemed about the size of a Saturn rocket- and equally importantly a good toy department in the basement, but based on what I remember reading in the book department, must have closed in the mid-1980s. But there’s something brilliantly simple about the idea of having lots of little shops inside one big one- it has to be a good idea, or the big out-of-town supermarkets wouldn’t be trying to get in on the act. Somewhere you can go in, have a cup of coffee and something to eat and then buy whatever you need in no particular order, whether it’s a set of pans, crockery, bedding, clothes, novelties, perfume or whatever- and then grab another coffee before heading home.

The trouble is, shopping seems to have become so much more compartmentalised these days and clothing labels in particular have more shops in their own right, so that if you want a Ted Baker shirt, you can look through a small selection in Debenhams, or you can go to the Ted Baker shop which carries the full range. It’s also more difficult and expensive these days to park in city centres, whereas out-of-town developments will welcome you with open arms because you’re about to spend money. And yes, internet shopping has had its effects here too, although Amazon seem to be doing their best to become a department store of the ether selling shoes, exercise equipment, electricals and so on. We hear the phrase "cash-rich and time-poor" a lot these days (or used to), and I think part of the problem is that people are no longer prepared to spend all day browsing through shops when they can either do it all online or go to a Tesco Extra if they happen to need a new shirt, DVD player, pressure cooker and so on...It’s a shame, and I can’t help thinking of an exhibition I went to at Bradford Industrial Museum last year commemorating the Busby’s department store which closed in the early 1970s. In among the old restaurant menus and fittings preserved by the Busby family and former employees, there was a real sense of personality and identity- things which have been lost when practically every shop in a city centre is part of a national chain, and when the idea of a family business has been distinctly unfashionable for many years. Several years ago, the Leeds-based Austick’s bookshops were closed down or sold off because the head of the family died and those who were left preferred to sell the academic and medical shops to Blackwells and close the rest down, rather than try and compete as a family business in the same market place as Borders and around the corner from the largest Waterstone’s in the North of England.