Paige Shiver on London’s most famous department store as cultural institution, pilgrimage site, and national symbol
Friday. Knightsbridge. Briefly Inside.
Harrods is not primarily a shop in the way that most shops are primarily shops, which is to say it is a shop in the way that St Paul’s Cathedral is primarily a church: technically accurate, functionally correct, but insufficient as a description of what the building is actually doing in London’s cultural geography. What Harrods is doing is being Harrods, which is a thing that requires it to exist and to be the specific building that it is in the specific location that it is, and to be sufficiently famous that visiting it is itself a form of participation in London’s idea of itself.
I grew up in a part of London where you did not go to Harrods. Not because it was prohibited but because it existed in the same category as Buckingham Palace: a thing that was part of your city in the sense that it was there and you knew it was there, but not part of your city in the sense of being somewhere you went as part of daily or even occasional life. The first time I went inside, as an adult with my own reasons for being in Knightsbridge, I experienced the specific sensation of a place that is simultaneously more ordinary than its reputation — it is a shop, it has escalators, the food hall smells of chocolate and fish in a combination that should not work — and more extraordinary than any ordinary interpretation accounts for.
The Myth It Maintains
The myth Harrods maintains is that everything is available here, which its motto “Omnia, Omnibus, Ubique” (Everything, for everyone, everywhere) asserts and which its prices immediately qualify. Not everything is for everyone. The myth of universal provision in an institution of selective access is a specifically British thing to sustain, and Harrods sustains it with considerable expertise. The London Prat on Knightsbridge culture this week. The building is still there. The myth persists. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
