José Ignacio Aznar

For much of European history shops looked nothing like the ones we know today. Merchants often sold their goods from the ground floor of the same building they lived in, so you might simply walk up to an opening in the wall and buy what you needed while the family lived upstairs. Shutters opened onto the street and the goods sat right in front of you; the shopfront as we know it came later. By the eighteenth century this started to change in Britain. Shops began getting proper frames around their windows with pilasters at the sides and space above for the owner's name. You can still see a wonderful example at 56 Artillery Lane in London where a shopfront from around 1756 survives; its curved windows come from a time when large sheets of glass were still expensive. Paris was doing something similar. A beautiful shopfront appeared on the Quai de Bourbon between 1775 and 1777 and people admired it long after fashions changed; eventually it was saved and ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So by the late eighteenth century the shop was becoming something more than a place to sell things. It needed a face of its own and shopkeepers increasingly understood that this face could add something beautiful to the street. Jonathan Taylor puts the early story of the traditional shopfront rather nicely: "The origins of the traditional shopfront lie in the market stalls of the Middle Ages. Prior to the industrial revolution and the vast urban development which accompanied it, retail trade was dominated by the market. The earliest shops were generally simple variations of the market stall, and only partly enclosed by the building. An awning over a projecting stall was common. In another variation, the opening was protected by two horizontal shutters; the top one folding up to double as an awning or ‘pet roof’, and the lower one folding down to form the stall board. Today the term ‘stall-riser’ is still used to describe the front of the shopfront below the window. By the mid 18th century, the shop as we know it today had emerged. Glazing, which had probably first appeared in the late 17th century was now common. Small paned windows, frequently projecting out from under a canopy appeared in the more prestigious retail areas of London and the principal market towns. … In the spirit of classicism which then prevailed, a language of ornamentation emerged which was unique to the shopfront. Classical detailing was introduced to relieve the appearance of large shopfront openings in the walls of ordinary urban terraced houses. The beam or ‘bressummer’ which supported the facade above was disguised by an ‘entablature’, and classical columns, pediments or scrolled corbel brackets were introduced to give visual support. The entablature provided an ideal opportunity for displaying the name of the shop, and the frieze or fascia was enlarged accordingly." I started this newsletter because I love old buildings and the stories behind them. Every week I pick something beautiful and try to figure out what made it so special. If that sounds like your kind of thing you can join below; and if you’d like to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber: architecturetradition.substa…