As the city of Launceston is my home town in the state of Tasmania, I keep an eye on a Facebook page devoted to the history of Launceston and Northern Tasmania Recently someone posted 1969 photos of several streets and intersections in the central city area. I haven’t been to Launceston recently, but know shopping centres out in the suburbs have grown in importance and taken a lot of that bustle from the CBD over time. It was started by supermarkets and other important food shops, then shops other than supermarkets gradually moved into the biggest centres, eventually having several locations out of the city and, then branch offices of banks and even some government departments followed, and so on. In cities everywhere in the world this process has changed CBDs, including in our current city of Montevideo Uruguay, where it has been just as marked. On my first visit in 1989, the footpaths were crowded from 10am when the shops opened, to around 10 at night, but today there’s a mere fraction of the people in any street downtown.
People’s behaviour has changed, too. If she were still alive, my mother would probably regretfully comment on the clear drop in standards that people show when they go shopping today – she never left home to shop down town without being in one of about 2 of 3 suitable outfits complete with stockings (which had seams in those days ) hat and gloves. (perhaps with an audible sniff) When we were children, every home had bottled milk delivered every morning, usually from around 4 or 5 am to about 8am. The baker, green grocer and butcher would all deliver a couple of times weekly (many people had a standing order, and paid the bill at the shop monthly) Some green grocers and bakeries would also have mobile delivery vans that would visit areas at certain known regular times, so that when people expected them, they’d come outside and buy at their front gate. There were many more local post offices everywhere back then, so people walked to collect parcels sent to them, and letters were delivered to homes twice a day, between 8.30 – 11.30, and about 1 and 4, and once on saturdays. But for furniture, clothes, shoes, books, linen and bedding, fabrics, knitting wool and all kinds of other things, you had to ‘go to town’, literally. And one day a week, thursday afternoons, Mum would go to town. This meant leaving a baby sitter, Mrs Jessop, in charge of us, changing her clothes to a good outfit, selecting hat, gloves and handbag to complement that. She had the car that afternoon, to do who knows what around the town, and always brought home packets of multicoloured Fruity Chews which she’d give to us if Mrs Jessop confirmed we’d been good girls that afternoon – oh yes, we knew how to respond to that promise of a treat!
“Going to town” required being properly dressed. As someone on that FB paged commented, going to town was pretty up there with going to church, or going to Grandma’s for sunday lunch (both mandatory weekly fixtures in our young lives)
Now, another angle on this aspect of my upbringing comes from the visit by two friends a few days ago. One of them grew up in this very well heeled Montevideo suburb, Carrasco. She and her husband currently live in the central area of the city which is all undergoing some degree of gentrification. They’re renovating their 3 story building into a comfortable 2 story city home above a ground floor with a commercial space and two small apartments. They stopped at our nearest local supermarket for something to bring for lunch, and she commented that shopping there was so different to shopping in her downtown local supermarket.
It wasn’t just the obvious one of the different balance in the range of goods stocked. She commented on how people dressed – and I certainly do a visual check/slight upgrade, possibly even change a shirt, before I go shopping around here, because I have certain clothes I only wear at home doing chores and stitching. And I know that everyone else in the store will be well dressed and well turned out. Even if they’re shopping on the way home from the nearby sports club or gym, they somehow manage to look well turned out!
But my friend also said that even conversations between shoppers were very different, too, and this I must follow up that some time. Local shoppers of course know other local shoppers, but here they do tend to just stop where they are and chat on, seemingly oblivious to how they’re blocking other people until someone asks one of them to move – whereas where our friend shops, people tend to be much more aware of other shoppers and usually just step aside without being asked… interesting! But that’s for another day.