#high-street — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #high-street, aggregated by home.social.
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Worn Town
Whitehaven town centre, showing the weather and empty shops sadly common in UK of late
Lens: Tamron 18-300mm F/3.5-6.3 Di III-A VC VXD on a Fujifilm X-T30
#highstreet #shopsign #towncenter #urbanphotography #photography
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From New Balance to Superdry – here’s 24 items our shopping expert is buying this weekend
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Kurt Geiger’s new Cabana collection is the ultimate summer wardrobe upgrade
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What to wear to RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 – stylish outfit ideas for every summer event
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John Lewis unveils major change to beloved department store cafés
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Greggs fans fuming as bakery’s meal deal is now more expensive than Waitrose
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From Barbour to Urban Outfitters – here’s 23 items a shopping expert is buying this week
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I found wedding shoes that look designer – but start at £27
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The £28 New Look brown suede bag fashion fans say rivals a £550 designer style
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Iconic high street chain is making a comeback next month after closing all stores
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174 High Street, 1978
Photograph showing the exterior of the building at 174 Hight Street, Lower Hutt, with the shops Judith Anne Cake Kitchen and EMI Music Centre.
Hutt City Libraries via DigitalNZ -
The 9 best summer dresses for work, weekends and pub gardens
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Claire’s will close all UK and Ireland stores in another blow to the high street
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The 14 best windbreaker jackets from H&M, M&S, Next and more
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Veeno Bars enters administration amid rising ‘market pressures’ as high street woes continue https://www.diningandcooking.com/2599559/veeno-bars-enters-administration-amid-rising-market-pressures-as-high-street-woes-continue/ ##economy #HighStreet #Italia #Italian #ItalianWine #italiano #italy #money #StoreClosures #Wine
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Polka dots are back for spring 2026 – and they’re taking over the high street
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Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s Love Story style gets a high-street update at M&S
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UK garden centre collapses into administration – family business since | UK | News https://www.allforgardening.com/1708978/uk-garden-centre-collapses-into-administration-family-business-since-uk-news/ #Administration #Employment #FAMILYBUSINESS #garden #HighStreet #OppermanPlantsLtd #Retail #StoreClosures #UKGardenCentreCollapse
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From River Island to Dyson – I’m a shopping expert and these are the 25 things I’m buying this weekend
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Lace is the biggest spring fashion trend of 2026 – these are the pieces we are buying
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From Boots to M&S, Next to Bravissimo – everything our shopping expert is buying this week
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I tested the ECCO BIOM 720 Beathru at Universal Studios – are they the best walking trainers of 2026?
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Naked dressing is the bold new trend celebs and the high street can’t get enough of
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From Superdry to Primark – here’s 22 items a shopping expert is buying
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Louise Thompson designs new petite range for Nobody’s Child – solving high street sizing woes
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The beloved fast food chain older than McDonald’s that’s still thriving after 87 years
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From Jellycat to Fenty Beauty, M&S to River Island – here’s 31 things to buy this weekend
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Atmospherically misleading: the thread about Louis H. Grimshaw’s paintings of Edinburgh
This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.
Today’s (July 9th 2023) Auction House Artefact was this evocative and eerie late-evening painting of the High Street in Edinburgh, looking towards St. Giles after the rain. Painted by Louis H. Grimshaw in 1895, in the “moonlit cityscape” style he inherited from his father, John Atkinson Grimshaw.
St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Louis H. Grimshaw, 1895The young Louis Grimshaw started working as an artist as an assistant to his father, helping with the details such as the people on moody and atmospheric late night scenes such as this one, “Glasgow, Saturday Night“, showing the hustle and bustle of the Broomielaw on the Clyde. The Grimshaws talent was one of capturing the ethereal glow of a sunset or moonlight as it reflected through clouds upon a wet cityscape and contrasting that with the bright, artificial lights of modernity. They also chose to deliberately avoid the dirt, grime and squalor of Victorian town life in their paintings, creating evocative but fundamentally sanitised scenes.
“Glasgow, Saturday Night”. John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1886Father and son worked together until the former’s death in 1893. At this juncture, Louis continued the style and subject matter himself. In his painting of St. Giles, we see the historic and frequently decrepit Old Town portrayed as a modern and prosperous city, with glowing shop lights, busy shoppers, clean streets, neat rows of gas lamps a horse tram picking up passengers. (This was the brief 12 year period when the Old Town had a tram route up the High Street, which was lost the year after this scene was painted when the horse trams moved over to cable traction and the route was shifted down the Mound instead)
Details. St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Louis H. Grimshaw, 1895Despite his talents, Louis Grimshaw packed in the unpredictable and insecure life as painter in 1905, swapping it for the steady pay and regular work of a cartographer, for The Guardian, in 1905. As such he left a limited body of work and it commands high prices – £70-100k for the St. Giles painting when it last sold in 2008. He mainly depicted London but seems to have painted 3 Edinburgh scenes in 1895. Below we have the classic view up the High Street from “John Knox’s” House looking towards the Tron Kirk and St. Giles, the moon glowing somewhere above Auld Reekie’s smoggy cloak.
Looking up the High Street to the Tron Kirk, Louis H. Grimshaw, 1895A small troop of Highlanders are marching downhill from the Castle to Holyrood. The gaslamps are lit, the shop windows are bright and on the right is the welcoming lamp and incongruous (for the Old Town) classical columns of Carrubers Close Mission.
Details. Looking up the High Street to the Tron Kirk, Louis H. Grimshaw, 1895Grimshaw’s scene matches *very* closely a photograph from the 1890s by John Patrick one can’t but wonder if it was the inspiration. The photo also shows the reality of the High Street compared to Grimshaw’s stylised, gentrified painting. Mixed in with the bustle and prosperity are the shoeless, malnourished children and obvious signs of the decaying, overcrowded accommodation of the Old Town that made life here so tenuous for so many children
High Street, Edinburgh, looking towards the Tron Kirk and St. Giles, by Robert Patrick, c. 1890, CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandIn fact, it’s such a close match, I think that Grimshaw’s scene can only have been a tracing of Patrick’s photograph. See for yourself below:
Grimshaw’s painting overlaid on Patrick’s photographGrimshaw’s last Edinburgh scene (that I can find) shows Holyroodhouse from the foot of the Canongate. Again the moon behind the cloud and smog casts an eerie glow over the damp road. Again the lights are bright and streets are clean. Again this is very sanitised scene compared to the reality of life in the Canongate at that time.
Holyroodhouse from the Canongate, Louis H. Grimshaw, 1895The reality was that in the 1890s, the Canongate – at one time long ago the suburban retreat of the City’s wealthy classes – was a crumbling, overcrowded and insanitary neighbourhood, where disease, malnourishment and poverty were endemic and child mortality was high.
Stereoscopic view of Canongate looking east towards Holyrood, Thomas Begbie, 1887. From the Cavaye Collection © Edinburgh City LibrariesDon’t get me wrong, I love these paintings and the artist’s skill in conjouring up the atmosphere. But they are a set-dressed fantasy, this thread on the diet of the working class of the Canongate in 1901 gives a window on what life was really like here for many. My Mum’s family lived this reality, at this time- flitting between the slums of the Canongate, High Street, St. Leonards and Stockbridge, constantly on the move; looking for something better or leaving behind something worse. They were Irish immigrant labourers, at the very bottom of the pile, and that reality was of their eleven children, eight predeceased their mother and four never made their 1st birthday. Of the children that survived to adulthood, five died as young adults from TB: even in the better times of the 1930s and 40s, the legacy of a childhood in the slums caught up with them.
Sorry. Ranty reality check over – please don’t get me wrong, these are very nice and evocative paintings. Stick a couple of dancers and a butler in them and they’d be quite like a Jack Vettriano scene. Do enjoy them; but they absolutely need a word of caution about how artificial the world is that they present us with.
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