Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Daring department store stunts, warming cups of cocoa, argumentative bartering with butchers. What can revisiting high streets

gone by reveal about British social history? Well, in her new book, The Bookshop, the Draper,

the candlestick maker, historian Annie Gray takes listeners on a shopping stroll through the centuries. I spoke to

Annie to learn more about the goods, refreshments and entertainment on offer.

Thank you so much for joining me, Annie, to talk about your latest book, which revisits the history

of the British High Street. You say in the book that the High Street has always

reflected the needs and desires of the people who used it. So what can we learn from looking at

high streets about the eras in which they existed? So much. First of all, you have to look at the shops.

I mean, I do argue, and I would argue very forcefully, that the High Street isn't just about shops, but just if you want the purest example, walking down a high street in the past, or now, you see the things that people want on a quotidian basis. And even if you take into account the current situation where you can buy almost anything online and have it delivered straight away, you never know quite sure what you're getting. So a lot of the shops that you see on the high street are the things that people need. So if you were walking down a high street in, say, 1983, you'd have things like saddlers and leather workers. You'd have specialist shops for pork and different meats and butcher's were all divided up. You'd have a lot of shop selling cloth because ready to wear clothing

wasn't around yet. And of course, if you wanted to wear something, that meant you had to go

to buy cloth. And loads and loads of things that we just wouldn't buy today. We don't have a

role for in our lives. Tiny little bits of ironmongery and things like that. And with high streets

in particular, I define the high street as the major shopping street or precinct area in a town.

So I'm not looking at suburbia and I'm not looking at the kind of out-of-town shopping centres that you get.

So those high streets were always relatively prestigious.

They were the areas that people went to for leisure shopping as well as quotidian stuff.

So looking at the leisure side of thing.

And that's really where you get high street, fixed shops come from first of all, because

most people shopped at them markets for most of history. So when you first start to get fixed shops,

it's things like jewelers, and it's swordsmiths and it's clockworkers. And then you get

lace merchants, expensive things that you don't want to have on an open stall.

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