Though I believe that people who use the phrase ‘retail therapy’ should probably have their voting rights removed, I do like shops – the lights and the people and the chatter. My mum was a shopgirl for much of her life and the only other job I’ve had apart from being a writer was as a teenage runaway shopgirl, selling scent in a chemist’s at King’s Cross station. I’ve never done an ‘online shop’ in my life. Though I can see that they’re useful to the sick and the immobile and those with large families, I don’t want to live in an atomised world where everything is done alone, sitting down – with people then complaining about being lonely and overweight.

Going broke is the price woke retailers pay for attempting to scold and mould the women who literally pay their wages

It’s a combination of online shopping and the council’s war on cars which has contributed to Brighton’s most attractive shopping boulevard, East Street, becoming like a ghost town. Before Brighton was a city, East Street was home to fishermen and farm labourers, but became desirable when the Royal Pavilion was built, giving it a palace at one end and the seafront at the other. Full of swishy boutiques, alfresco restaurants and brilliant jazzy buskers, it’s one of those rare pedestrianised streets that doesn’t look grim and forced. Or at least it was. This month alone, three shops in the street have closed – Sandro, Male and most recently Kurt Geiger.

Though I’m very much in the sensible shoes era of my days, I used to nip into KG frequently to buy presents for young friends, but had swerved it for the past five years due to overkill on the LGBTQ merching front. I obviously like homosexuals or I wouldn’t have lived in Sodom-and-Gomorrah-on-Sea for nigh on 30 years, but the amount of rainbow purses one can buy is not infinite. Towards the end it felt like I was being harassed by the massed ranks of handbags the moment I stepped through the door. ‘Our signature Kurt Geiger rainbow, blazoned across countless shoes, bags and accessories, signifies our brand values of kindness, joy, hope and inclusivity’ it says on their website but with prices like that, I reckon that Primark is a lot more inclusive, even if it doesn’t bang on about it. Still, with three large and handsome shops so close together gone within a few weeks, East Street now resembles a beloved face with most of its front teeth missing. I know that nothing stays the same and that Michael Gove believes that abandoned shops can be turned into cosy homes, but the sight of them still gives me a brief pang of nostalgia for my girlhood when an invitation to ‘go round the shops’ was a prompt for all sorts of fun.

One shop I won’t be sorry to see the back of is the local Body Shop, just up the road from East Street, even though the local papers headline was ‘BRIGHTON RESIDENTS SAD AS BODY SHOP FACES UNCERTAINTY’ following the news that the brand had gone into administration. To be honest, those interviewed didn’t seem terribly upset, with most commenting that they could no longer afford to shop there.

The observation ‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ is often made these days of businesses which attempt to disguise their money-mad mentalities by plastering saccharine sentiments over their products. The Body Shop was probably first to, as the FT put it, ‘advocate a form of ethical capitalism in which businesses could make money and do good at the same time.’ But the Body Shop was about far more than the current epidemic of nauseating virtue-signalling. Anita Roddick opened the first shop in Brighton in 1976; my own excellent MP Peter Kyle wrote of her:

‘As an 18 year-old in 1989 I started in one of the lowest paid jobs in the company, keying invoices on the purchase ledger. As an acute dyslexic I struggled but desperately wanted to do well in a company I loved, so I often went in quietly on Sundays to make sure I stayed on top of things. One Sunday I was the only person in the head office in Littlehampton until I saw Anita drive up and walk into the other end of the huge open-plan office. She came over and asked why on earth I was at work on a Sunday; she asked about my life and opinions. From that day on I had an invisible hand pushing me forward and always keeping me out of my comfort zone. She packed me off to speak to schools, care homes, and community groups whenever she couldn’t do it herself. Imagine sending the most junior person from a company as a replacement for the CEO? Who does that? One day she came up to me and asked how I was doing, I said I was terrified the whole time because of all the public speaking. She told me that one day I would thank her for it because I would lose my fear of speaking in front of people and be free to think about what I was going to say instead.’

The Body Shop wasn’t to my taste (the olfactory assault from the combined whiff of Peppermint Foot Cream, Dewberry Oil and White Musk body spray was a bit much for a precocious girl whose favourite fragrance as an 18-year-old was First by Van Cleef & Arpels) but I do remember reading one day in the 1990s about a man who enjoyed bathing in diluted Coca-Cola. I’ve always loved the smell of the stuff so imagine my delight when I saw in the window of the Brighton Body Shop something called Cola Bubble Bath. I was delighted with it and got through a bottle a week until one day when I went to replenish my stash and asked for some, having not found it on the shelf, a new assistant looked at me as if I’d requested three grams of raw opium served up on a week-old baby – and denied they’d ever stocked the stuff. I never went back.

This was just the beginning of the degradation of Body Shop. Anita Roddick died in 2007; original and honest to the end, she had described leaving money to family as ‘obscene’ and gave her £50 million fortune to charity. The brand she had founded with such high hopes became just another shop selling slop to women by making them feel bad about their bodies; bullies with bath-bombs. It was perfectly consistent when in 2020, just hours after JK Rowling detailed her experiences of domestic violence and wrote the line ‘Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now’ with regards to the threats and name-calling from the trans community, the Body Shop sent a snarky message to her: ‘Hey @jk_rowling here’s something we made earlier, we thought you might like one! We’ve also popped in a vegan bath bomb and a copy of Trans Rights by @paisleycurrah for you to read in the bath!’

Understandably, there was online bite-back from bolshy broads: ‘The Body Shop thinks women talking about surviving domestic abuse is something to mock. What a look, eh?’ and ‘Is the Body Shop’s position now that women who talk about their experience of domestic violence need to be “corrected” and patronised?’

Personally, I’d love to get a look at the actual Body Shop employee who wrote that Tweet and stand them beside Rowling – a woman who survived poverty and violence and became so successful, so rich and so generous that she went from being a billionaire to a mere multi-millionaire by giving away her money to good causes – and ask: what have you achieved, exactly?’ The capture was complete; a brand which once cared about not tormenting rabbits by squirting shampoo in their eyes now supported the chemical castration of gay teenagers.

So I’m glad that the Body Shop is in administration – and I’d love to see the back of Lush next. It may boast of being cruelty-free but the assault on the senses whenever I pass its East Street store is violent. In Toronto, residents near the Lush factory protested about the stench some years back, complaining of migraines, allergies and skin irritations, while other residents wore gas masks to mow their lawns.

Like all idiots, Lush is against Israel; when asked why it refused to open stores there, a spokesman said ‘We have a multicultural attitude to everything we do; we want everyone in the country where we are trading to be on an equal footing as far as basic human rights go’. Yet it will happily trade in Saudi Arabia, where peaceful women’s rights activists are imprisoned and tortured and where homosexuality is punishable by death. Lush stinks in more ways than one. And now John Lewis has joined the register of rotten retailers, involving itself in trans visibility and breast-binders for children.

A day shopping with a mate once made matrons feel like girls again, carefree and free-spending; now it’s like being re-educated. A message to retailers: keep lecturing us, hectoring us and telling us to let men into our changing rooms, and you may well find that your shop too goes up the swanny – and serve you right.  Going broke is the price woke retailers pay for attempting to scold and mould the women who literally pay their wages.

Still, when you do go broke – as in my beloved, benighted, beleaguered East Street – you will be at least be giving shelter to the homeless who could not have afforded even a mere BE KIND ring (£59) from Kurt Geiger. And at last you will be doing something socially useful – just like you pretended you wanted to all along.