London in my Time by Thomas Burke

My earliest impressions of London were, as I say, of lamps and shop- windows. The city seemed to me to be all shops: hundreds, thousands, millions of shops, every one of them an invitation, so that one was worried as to which to accept and which to pass. The shops of the little side-streets made as keen an appeal as those of the great streets. Each was an Aladdin's Cave, its windows only hinting at richer wonders awaiting those entitled to explore its dim recesses. Sometimes I was grieved to think that however zealously I set about it I would never, could never, look in the windows of every shop in London.

Among the first shops I ever saw was one whose window, at this moment of writing, is dressed as it was when I saw it from a height of three feet. While so many old-established businesses in one particular line have, in the past thirty or forty years, demolished their premises and returned to life as general stores, or at any rate six sizes larger, this shop has neither altered nor extended itself, nor even changed its style of display. It stands to-day as it did, and its windows have suffered the ferment of the years without ageing and without apeing the frantic young. It makes no concessions to those "times" which are often responsible for disastrous experiment. It has no need to. London can rush ahead or pull itself about as it pleases; this shop remains static and shows that window-dressing of the old sort can attract as many eyes as the most Picasso or Matisse challenge. It is pleasant in a world of change to find something which is at once an immovable object and an irresistible force, and I can never pass along Oxford Street without pausing at the old, familiar windows of Buszard's.