Rossiters department store in Paignton, Devon, has just closed after 150 years of trading. Before it went Chadds of Hereford, after 80 years. This seems a great pity. The best department stores are the ultimate comfort zone. Most Saturday mornings of my childhood were spent in the paradise of Marshall & Snelgrove, in Scarborough, which had everything one could want. There was a huge clock on which I learned to tell the time, a lift with a patient liftman who let me ride endlessly up and down ("Ground floor, perfumery, luggage, cruise wear, and going up, going up"). The shoe department had a machine for x-raying your feet - I am probably still radioactive. Best of all was the cafe: ice-cream sundae in a tall glass while mannequins paraded between the tables in the latest costumes and little veiled hats.
Now, more than 50 years on, Marshall & Snelgrove is long since gone (sold off in the early 70s) but while the provinces are finding life hard, in London department stores are going strong, bucking the recession even. Last month, John Lewis, House of Fraser and Liberty all announced improved sales over Christmas compared with the same period in 2007. Selfridges is celebrating its centenary.
Perhaps this is not surprising. Department stores carry a sense of an age gone by and offer a third way between the misery of trudging the cold, wet high street and purgatorial shopping malls. Save your shopping up and, with luck, you can get everything under one roof, from a new bra to a new bed, a packet of knitting needles to a garden umbrella, and in between browse through the spring fashions to see what you ought to be looking like.
You can sustain yourself all day under one roof, too. A late breakfast of warm croissants and tea, excellent mid-morning coffee and an array of pastries, a light lunch at the salad bar, afternoon tea and cake. In Selfridges, drink organic smoothies and lunch on dim sum; in John Lewis there are hot pancakes made to order; in Harrods you can eat oysters. It's a day out.
After the garden centres like aircraft hangers, in which you are hard pressed to find a tin of slug pellets among the cheap vases and remainder books, or a slog down a high street to find a real unboarded-up shop among the estate agents and building societies, an hour or three spent in a good department store is balm to the soul.
