ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand the nature of retailing in the eighteenth century in order to explore some of the definitions and assumptions that have been made about the emergence and the novelty of the department store in the nineteenth century. It examines the design and display of mainly high-class shops in London through the course of the eighteenth century with some examples drawn from the early nineteenth century. Fixed shops ranged from the simple conversion of a trader’s front room to the establishments with sophisticated interior design which predominated in London’s key shopping streets. The first room of London shops was typically long and narrow in comparison to present-day high street outlets, as they were based on the ground plan of terraced buildings, conventionally 14-16 feet wide. However, the types of decoration revealed in the inventories would have had considerable impact in shops this size.
