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| Smart, not snobbish: the nice shops of the past feel like sideshows now | Smart, not snobbish: the nice shops of the past feel like sideshows now |
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| Sat 30 Sep 2017 06.00 BST | |
| Last modified on Mon 27 Nov 2017 16.10 GMT | |
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| The word nice has had such a bad press that my fingers hesitate to type it. Such an inadequate adjective, so we were taught at school: to be used only when you mean “slight” or “subtle” – a nice difference, a nice distinction – and never to mean “pleasant” or “agreeable”. My first newspaper felt the same about “tasteful”. “An adjective which although used in a complimentary sense contrives to be faintly insulting,” said the stylebook. “It is chiefly associated with decorations or with the performances of concert artists. If all that can be said about flowers or colour schemes is that they are tasteful, one had better say nothing.” | The word nice has had such a bad press that my fingers hesitate to type it. Such an inadequate adjective, so we were taught at school: to be used only when you mean “slight” or “subtle” – a nice difference, a nice distinction – and never to mean “pleasant” or “agreeable”. My first newspaper felt the same about “tasteful”. “An adjective which although used in a complimentary sense contrives to be faintly insulting,” said the stylebook. “It is chiefly associated with decorations or with the performances of concert artists. If all that can be said about flowers or colour schemes is that they are tasteful, one had better say nothing.” |
| Other than for food, clothes and children’s treats, shopping was a process of looking rather than buying | Other than for food, clothes and children’s treats, shopping was a process of looking rather than buying |
| But nice has its uses. Sometimes no other word will do. This summer in Scotland, a Glasgow friend remembered how his mother used to talk about the “nice shops” that were once a feature of Sauchiehall Street, meaning department stores such as Copland & Lye and the French-styled (but not actually French) Treron et Cie, or Daly’s Bridal Boutique, or Jean’s Tearoom, which did a fine high-calorie salad of tinned peaches and cream cheese. All gone, of course, together with their hatted customers: Sauchiehall Street is now so depressing that my friend goes to some trouble to avoid it on his journeys through the city. But “nice shops” … I knew exactly what he meant, because my mother used the same phrase, and in her case applied it to emporia in Fife or Edinburgh that managed to be neither utilitarian, like the local Co-op, nor frighteningly grand – a shop you felt you had no business being inside – like Jenners’ Victorian fortress on Princes Street. | But nice has its uses. Sometimes no other word will do. This summer in Scotland, a Glasgow friend remembered how his mother used to talk about the “nice shops” that were once a feature of Sauchiehall Street, meaning department stores such as Copland & Lye and the French-styled (but not actually French) Treron et Cie, or Daly’s Bridal Boutique, or Jean’s Tearoom, which did a fine high-calorie salad of tinned peaches and cream cheese. All gone, of course, together with their hatted customers: Sauchiehall Street is now so depressing that my friend goes to some trouble to avoid it on his journeys through the city. But “nice shops” … I knew exactly what he meant, because my mother used the same phrase, and in her case applied it to emporia in Fife or Edinburgh that managed to be neither utilitarian, like the local Co-op, nor frighteningly grand – a shop you felt you had no business being inside – like Jenners’ Victorian fortress on Princes Street. |
| The humorist Paul Jennings once devoted one of his Observer columns to imagining department stores as characters – thus Swan & Edgar became the hero and his bird-companion in an Anglo-Saxon myth, while Debenham & Freebody were two bowler-hatted civil servants. If “nice shops” were to be similarly personified, the temptation is to imagine them as a pair of middle-class housewives, their little fingers delicately crooked around their teacups, as they discuss the good looks of Sir Anthony Eden and the attractions or otherwise of the moustache. | The humorist Paul Jennings once devoted one of his Observer columns to imagining department stores as characters – thus Swan & Edgar became the hero and his bird-companion in an Anglo-Saxon myth, while Debenham & Freebody were two bowler-hatted civil servants. If “nice shops” were to be similarly personified, the temptation is to imagine them as a pair of middle-class housewives, their little fingers delicately crooked around their teacups, as they discuss the good looks of Sir Anthony Eden and the attractions or otherwise of the moustache. |
| In fact, neither my friend’s mother nor mine represented that kind of easily satirised gentility. They were working-class women whose lives hadn’t been easy – my friend lived with his widowed mother and grandmother in two tenement rooms – for whom “nice” meant attractive shops where well-mannered staff sold produce of good quality. How much of this produce these women could have afforded is another question, but that did nothing to stint their appreciation: they came to see rather than to buy, like a visitor to the Louvre. | In fact, neither my friend’s mother nor mine represented that kind of easily satirised gentility. They were working-class women whose lives hadn’t been easy – my friend lived with his widowed mother and grandmother in two tenement rooms – for whom “nice” meant attractive shops where well-mannered staff sold produce of good quality. How much of this produce these women could have afforded is another question, but that did nothing to stint their appreciation: they came to see rather than to buy, like a visitor to the Louvre. |
| Was snobbery involved? As an Alan Bennett character famously observes of a man arrested for exposing himself in a Sainsbury’s doorway: “Tesco, you could understand it.” Perhaps there was a little of that search for superiority in the preference for Bainbridge over Fenwick in Newcastle, or Patrick Thomson (“Pee Tee’s”) over Binns in Edinburgh, or in any other British city where rival department stores reflected a little of the local gradations in wealth and social class. But mainly it was the goods on display – “nice things” – that drew women like our mothers to the window, and occasionally through the door. Their longings were rooted in aesthetics rather than swank, or keeping up with the Joneses – a puzzling phrase to them when it first appeared, describing behaviour that belonged to a younger and more prosperous generation. | Was snobbery involved? As an Alan Bennett character famously observes of a man arrested for exposing himself in a Sainsbury’s doorway: “Tesco, you could understand it.” Perhaps there was a little of that search for superiority in the preference for Bainbridge over Fenwick in Newcastle, or Patrick Thomson (“Pee Tee’s”) over Binns in Edinburgh, or in any other British city where rival department stores reflected a little of the local gradations in wealth and social class. But mainly it was the goods on display – “nice things” – that drew women like our mothers to the window, and occasionally through the door. Their longings were rooted in aesthetics rather than swank, or keeping up with the Joneses – a puzzling phrase to them when it first appeared, describing behaviour that belonged to a younger and more prosperous generation. |
| What these nice things were, I find hard to recall. Gloves, headscarves and brooches probably; ornamental china certainly. A three-piece suite and a display cabinet bought in 1955 proved to be my parents’ final purchases of furniture – the rest had been bought in the 1930s. Nothing had been thrown away. | What these nice things were, I find hard to recall. Gloves, headscarves and brooches probably; ornamental china certainly. A three-piece suite and a display cabinet bought in 1955 proved to be my parents’ final purchases of furniture – the rest had been bought in the 1930s. Nothing had been thrown away. |
| There was simply no room for anything else, not even inside the display cabinet. My grandmother’s collection of souvenirs – crested pots from seaside resorts, a stuffed canary – crammed every shelf. Other than for food, clothes and children’s treats, therefore, shopping was a process of looking rather than buying – of looking, and more looking and looking again in a traipse through town that ended with a high tea of fried fish (or mutton pies or sausages) in a cafe or department-store restaurant. It was this final moment that made the day. | There was simply no room for anything else, not even inside the display cabinet. My grandmother’s collection of souvenirs – crested pots from seaside resorts, a stuffed canary – crammed every shelf. Other than for food, clothes and children’s treats, therefore, shopping was a process of looking rather than buying – of looking, and more looking and looking again in a traipse through town that ended with a high tea of fried fish (or mutton pies or sausages) in a cafe or department-store restaurant. It was this final moment that made the day. |
| The great age of the British tearoom had passed by then, though only just, and as a child I knew nothing of its glories. In Glasgow, the last of Miss (Kate) Cranston’s tearooms closed its doors in 1954; in their heyday, 50 years before, when Glasgow could be described by a guidebook as “a very Tokyo for tearooms”, Cranston’s had been in the vanguard of artistic and social progress, an emblem of the city’s modernity, with stylish interiors designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and rooms reserved for the use of women only. | The great age of the British tearoom had passed by then, though only just, and as a child I knew nothing of its glories. In Glasgow, the last of Miss (Kate) Cranston’s tearooms closed its doors in 1954; in their heyday, 50 years before, when Glasgow could be described by a guidebook as “a very Tokyo for tearooms”, Cranston’s had been in the vanguard of artistic and social progress, an emblem of the city’s modernity, with stylish interiors designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and rooms reserved for the use of women only. |
| In London, its equivalent was the much larger enterprise of J Lyons & Co, which opened its first tearoom in 1894 and by the end of the second world war had 200 of them scattered across the capital and the English provinces. Lyons too believed in art, and from 1946 to 1955 commissioned lithographs from painters such as Edward Bawden, John Nash, LS Lowry and Edward Ardizzone to hang above the tables where customers forked their way through plates of welsh rarebit and cauliflower cheese. | In London, its equivalent was the much larger enterprise of J Lyons & Co, which opened its first tearoom in 1894 and by the end of the second world war had 200 of them scattered across the capital and the English provinces. Lyons too believed in art, and from 1946 to 1955 commissioned lithographs from painters such as Edward Bawden, John Nash, LS Lowry and Edward Ardizzone to hang above the tables where customers forked their way through plates of welsh rarebit and cauliflower cheese. |
| These places and their local variants – Mackie’s in Edinburgh, Bewley’s in Dublin – gave a postwar generation its introduction to eating out. No foreign food, no alcohol: eating and drinking were entirely separate activities, to be joined together only in middle-class venues such as licensed restaurants and hotel dining rooms. It was most probably in the tearoom’s subdued and teetotal atmosphere that I first encountered niceness as a popular idea. A nice cup of tea – remarked on as such; a nice sausage; a nice scone; a nice waitress – to be rewarded with a sixpence or two left under the lip of the saucer. “Well, that was nice,” people said to each other, as they stretched their arms into their raincoat sleeves. | These places and their local variants – Mackie’s in Edinburgh, Bewley’s in Dublin – gave a postwar generation its introduction to eating out. No foreign food, no alcohol: eating and drinking were entirely separate activities, to be joined together only in middle-class venues such as licensed restaurants and hotel dining rooms. It was most probably in the tearoom’s subdued and teetotal atmosphere that I first encountered niceness as a popular idea. A nice cup of tea – remarked on as such; a nice sausage; a nice scone; a nice waitress – to be rewarded with a sixpence or two left under the lip of the saucer. “Well, that was nice,” people said to each other, as they stretched their arms into their raincoat sleeves. |
| Such places still exist, but they seem senescent now, a sideshow to the onward march of the great coffee chains and sandwich franchises. The brilliant exception is Bettys, the Yorkshire firm that has tearooms in Ilkley, York, Northallerton and Harrogate. Travelling back from Scotland and remembering my friend’s phrase about “nice shops”, we stopped in Harrogate and had breakfast at Bettys. It was … very nice. To be more expressive, it was smartly run and politely staffed, served delicious food and beverages, and, rather than tourists, had a clientele of what I recognised as respectable locals talking about garden plants, Uncle Bob, and attic extensions. On our way out, we bought a Yorkshire tea loaf and some ginger pigs. | Such places still exist, but they seem senescent now, a sideshow to the onward march of the great coffee chains and sandwich franchises. The brilliant exception is Bettys, the Yorkshire firm that has tearooms in Ilkley, York, Northallerton and Harrogate. Travelling back from Scotland and remembering my friend’s phrase about “nice shops”, we stopped in Harrogate and had breakfast at Bettys. It was … very nice. To be more expressive, it was smartly run and politely staffed, served delicious food and beverages, and, rather than tourists, had a clientele of what I recognised as respectable locals talking about garden plants, Uncle Bob, and attic extensions. On our way out, we bought a Yorkshire tea loaf and some ginger pigs. |
| Why has Bettys flourished when so many similar British enterprises have gone under? A part of the answer must be that it has always resisted – and intends to go on resisting – the temptation to exploit its good name and roll itself out over the rest of the country (unlike, say, Patisserie Valerie, which may yet discover the perils of ubiquity). To experience peak niceness, therefore, anyone who doesn’t live there must travel to Yorkshire. The instruction is scarcely believable. | Why has Bettys flourished when so many similar British enterprises have gone under? A part of the answer must be that it has always resisted – and intends to go on resisting – the temptation to exploit its good name and roll itself out over the rest of the country (unlike, say, Patisserie Valerie, which may yet discover the perils of ubiquity). To experience peak niceness, therefore, anyone who doesn’t live there must travel to Yorkshire. The instruction is scarcely believable. |
| • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist | • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist |
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