Why I’m still mourning the death of the corner shop

Shopping has moved into consolidated, much bigger centres, built around the fact that everyone now has cars and can drive to the supermarket.

Does your suburb bear archaeological traces, sacred sites perhaps, of that distant era long ago when every local neighbourhood had its own small shopping centre? The traces of this localised past exist now as mere blips in the suburban landscape. Near my house there’s a little corner of former shops, converted now into pilates studios and accountants’ offices and the like. Many such former shop clusters have been converted to small houses or apartments.

I grew up in Lewisham, in Sydney’s legendary inner west. Our local shops had a greengrocer or mixed business as we called it, a kind of ultra-mini supermarket, a fish shop, butcher, milk bar, round the corner a newsagent and I seem to recall there might have been a women’s hairdresser.

When I was small, 60-odd years ago, local shopping centres were the fecund public squares of a forgotten life which once was localised. I could get threepence worth of chips – two cents in decimal currency – wrapped in newspaper.

In those distant days, most women who were wives and mothers didn’t have paid employment outside the home. So there was a lot of conversation and interchange between families and shopkeepers, families and other families, children and parents, which radiated out of the local shops. I did once or twice go for the threepenny worth of chips, but the centrepiece of the local shops for me was the newsagent, where I bought as many Marvel super hero comics as my modest pocket money would allow.

Those shops also sometimes facilitated communications within nuclear families themselves. My father set a very high standard of absent-mindedness, a quality he exhibited in all of his activities for all of his long and productive life. Remember, too, in those days there were no mobile phones, lots of families didn’t have cars and not everyone even had a landline.

One evening Dad arrived home from work and found our upstairs two bedroom flat, where the six of us lived in riotous good and bad humour, empty. He had the vaguest recollection that he was meant to meet us somewhere. A resourceful man, he took effective action.

He walked the few hundred metres down to our local mixed business, whose proprietor was basically part of our extended family. He asked Brian the shop owner, was Patty (my mum) in at all today? Yes, John, she was. Er, Dad asked a little shamefacedly, did she happen to say where she was going tonight? Yes, she’s meeting you at the boys’ school for a parent teacher night. Dad scooted along to the school and all was well.

Many such former shop clusters have been converted to small houses or apartments.

There’s no point lamenting the loss of the past. That’s the nature of the past, it’s gone. Shopping has moved into consolidated, much bigger centres, built around the fact that everyone now has cars and can drive to the supermarket. Unless they’re retired, both members of a couple work during the week. Giant malls didn’t exist when I was a kid. And of course a lot of shopping has gone online.

In Britain recently I couldn’t help but notice the local high streets have lost most of their retailers. The suburban travel agents have disappeared along with all the other small businesses. In the high streets now you mostly see real estate agents, charities, cafes and shuttered shops.

It’s not a tragedy that these shopping centres have gone, but those of us of a certain age can look back with a dollop of nostalgia, a modest salute of historic appreciation, at what was once the beating heart of a thousand functioning communities.