ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three West End bazaars: the Soho Bazaar, the Pantheon on Oxford Street, and the Lowther Bazaar on the Strand. It offers contrasting examples of the bazaar, a term seldom deployed in a strict way at the time. The bazaar prefigured both the department store and the shopping mall. What the commercial bazaar represented was the spectacle of nineteenth-century abundance–at least for the middle classes. There were many bazaars in central London after 1800, evidence of the format becoming popular in the late Georgian period. Royal patronage and its presence in the West End marked out the Soho Bazaar as a conservative institution. However, it was also shaped by the values of nineteenth-century liberalism, standing for self-help and rigid work discipline. As London grew, West End shops not only served those who lived close by but people from the suburbs and out of town.
