London's West End Department Stores: Whiteleys, Harrods and Waring & Gillows

This paper examines three major department stores in London's West End, Whiteleys, Harrods and Waring & Gillows, and interprets the design and architecture of these brand new modern spaces and places as the reflection of an ideal middle-class world and bourgeois life. The paper argues that at the same time these same spaces could be considered as dystopian to the working class in their exploitation of sales-girls. This paper formed part of a three-paper panel entitled 'Utopias or Dystopias? Public interiors in Late-Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century London'