They were the best of times, they were the worst of times

From The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. Page 113.

The high street at first seemed pretty much unchanged. The buildings offered a pleasantly higgledy-piggledy mix of styles, sizes, and materials, yet formed a comfortable and coherent whole in that way that British towns seemed to do so effortlessly for centuries and now often can do hardly at all. Though the buildings were the same, the businesses within them were completely changed. It is remarkable, when you think about it, how many types of shops have vanished from British high streets in only a few years: most butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, ironmongers, repair shops, gas showrooms, electricity board showrooms, most building societies, travel agents, and independent bookshops.

Lots of post offices have gone, too. It's a sacrilege not to lament their loss, and I am genuinely sorry to see them go, but it has to be said there was scarcely a less pleasurable, more Soviet-style environment in which to pass half an hour than in a British post office queue. They were bureaucracy gone mad. At their peak you could (genuinely) conduct any of 231 types of transactions in a British post office—renew your TV license, collect pensions and family allowances, pay car tax, withdraw or deposit money in a savings account, buy savings bonds, mail parcels. All that was required of you was that you be white-haired, hard of hearing, and able to spend up to an hour hunting through a tiny coin purse for a 20p piece.

I lived in England in the 1960s and at that time retail was highly regulated. No Sunday retail; half days on Wednesdays and Saturdays. No evening hours. Small stores of great specialization. No big box retail then, scarcely any department stores except in the biggest cities. Your typical town high street had rows of small stores (and small selections) with highly varying service. Shoes, Fruit & Veg, Butchers, Bookstore, Bakery, Iron Mongers, Newsagents, Cobbler, Chemists, Post Offices, Tea Rooms, the Bank with its high status branch manager, only very occasionally a restaurant, etc. Small aisles, tall shelves, the smell of the goods, generally a friendly store owner. It was a different experience from what we have become accustomed to.

We left England and by the time I returned in the mid-seventies the consolidations had begun. Very fortunately I was at a boarding school far out in the countryside and the small villages near us still reflected the older fashion of retail. By the eighties and nineties much of it was gone.

Today, I walk down the High Street of my childhood town and it is McDonalds, and ATMs, and Jewelry Store, Oxfam, a couple of newsagents, several fast food chains, Indian restaurants, real estate agents, Star Bucks, lots of Wine Bars, a NatWest Bank (Barclays long gone), Dry Cleaners, Woking Kebab, KFC, a Fitness Center. It looks drearier and tattier than before, even though there is more money in the exteriors and store dressing.

It's not bad, just different. There are now stores everywhere, not just on High Street. They are open all hours. You can get almost anything, most the time. There are restaurants everywhere, of many different sorts, and the quality of dining can be exceptional whereas decades ago, dining out was rare and marginal.

Part of the difference is that most Englishmen now have a car whereas fifty years ago, perhaps 10%. The old cloistered, limited, concentrated, human-sized, communal stores are gone replaced with choices and options. It is indisputably better though it doesn't necessarily feel that way when you recall the whiff of the baker's bread, the cheery smile of the postmistress, etc.