Pane and Glory
From Georgian panes to modernist steel, tracing the architectural journey of the British shopfront.
The Shopfront
A lively town or village is almost always one with a shop at it's heart. Even one modest shopfront is enough to give a place a heart; perhaps paired with a pub, a church, a phone or a post box.
The shop with its prominent window is a relatively modern invention. In ancient times, the centre of a community would have revolved around the market, which was a smelly and rowdy place. Ancient cities may have had bazaars and permanent stalls, but these weren't common in England, where the right to market was restricted by powerful landowners.
Before industrialisation, shops mainly served the elite; most people used markets or merchants. In the 19th century, shopfronts became central to the high street, with new types like banks adding architectural and social vibrancy.
As a consumer culture evolved with rapid population growth and urbanised, towns and cities quickly developed the linear shopping street to become the dominant urban form of the British city. The linear street was designed around the repeated module of ancient property divisions, providing for a variegated street frontage of shops, pubs, banks, houses and workshops all of more or less an equal width. Sometimes shops were knocked through and joined for larger frontages.
Photograph of Proposed New Shopfront for Biggs of Farnham Ltd at 112 & 112A West Street, Farnham, Surrey by Guy Maxwell Aylwin (1949) by Aylwin, GThe Blower Foundation
In the Victorian era, shopfronts evolved with float glass and cast iron, enabling wider panes. Yet many retained smaller Georgian and Regency-style panes, either conservatively or to save on replacement costs.
A bank shopfront
Shopfronts constantly adapted, as they still do, to changing tastes and uses. This sketch shows an elegant solution to providing a high-status elevation - it is a bank after all - its livery is in horizontal bands of Portland Stone and brass lettering in a high contrast.
The Victorian shop evolves
This design for a building of probably several hundred years antiquity, is here proposed to be almost entirely demolished at pavement level. A new shopfront is designed across the full width; this then allows for the door to the home above, cleverly retaining a smart symmetry.
Proposed shops to High Street, Haslemere, Surrey (1910) by Stedman, AJThe Blower Foundation
Living above the shop
Shops were for the most part also where the family lived, often above the shop, much as for Margaret Thatcher's childhood above her father's grocery and tobacconist. The purpose built shop units allow for shared access but privacy between the two uses.
Gentrification
As time passed, some former homes would be adapted to retail use and often this would mean wholesale remodelling of sometimes very ancient buildings, many dating back to the 15th & 16th century. New shopfronts were often of a much higher status than the host building, as seen here.
As the railway came to towns, they often skirted older historic centres and new land development allowed for an updated shopfront, built from scratch, rather than adapting the ground floor or earlier structures. These new kinds of shopping 'parades' are a precursor to the shopping mall of the post-war era, often catering to the motor car, with a changed relationship to the street, tending towards uniformity and with taller ceilings, higher and wider shopfronts taking precedence.
Proposed shop front at 30 Borough, Farnham, Surrey for Messrs J. Frisby Ltd. (1907) by Stedman, AJThe Blower Foundation
The Victorian shop matures
Cast iron enabled new and lighter structural design, here the ironwork holds up an ancient building across its full width. This enabled large sheets of glass and a window frame to separate from the structural load - the door is recessed back to protect passers-by from the rain.
Ultimately the shopfront serves a functional purpose at heart, not more than a picture frame around an important painting. But then framing is so much more than just functional, what is a da Vinci, a Renoir or Pollock without its frame? The shopfront and the scene behind the glass can work together to greater effect.
Proposed shop & premises in church lane east, Aldershot, Hampshire for Mr. F.E. Pfrangley (1910) by Stedman, AJThe Blower Foundation
A family affair
This house and shopfront are together quite upwardly mobile - not just a shop squeezed with others on an old high street, but detached and rather grand in a gable fronted 'villa' style, redolent of the country houses of the Victorian period.
By the 1960's, as the economy expanded again after war, fashions and tastes had changed and a Modernist aesthetic evolved away from decoration and overt detail towards a stripped back and clean appearance.
Factory made pre-fabricated shopfronts did not always lend themselves to sensitive adaptation of an old building and character often suffered. By the end of the 20th century, there was a renewed interest in saving and preserving traditional character in historic town centres.
Shopfronts on Castle Street, Farnham, Surrey (1947) by Aylwin, GThe Blower Foundation
The shop started simply as a place to buy provisions to meet daily needs, but in the 20th century it came to be a destination in itself. It became a place for the life of the community to be played out, a stage set.
The shopfront is the essence of a building's kerb appeal. It is not just the architectural form, but also material, colour and its dressing. Old shopfronts especially have such character, often making up for their smaller size with a history and tradition that charms. This recent design for replicating a rotted away 19th C shopfront, is with new livery for an architectural practice's HQ, both traditional and yet modern.
The 21st century shopfront
Today, learning from the mistakes of post-war decades, the return of the shopfront is apparent, with a matured understanding of how traditional shopfronts can give soul to a street, especially in historic shopping streets.
All Image Rights to The Blower Foundation
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