'Here & There' is a Wednesday series dedicated to shops. The 'here' is the area around Paddington. The 'there' is generally La Rive Gauche de Paris, especially the single-digit arrondissements. I am interested in how people live, not in retailing per se.
| Bellevue Road, Bellevue Hill |
Are you a harker? Do you look back to some of your childhood and wish it had not disappeared? I do – I wistfully hark back. It is as much in the language that swirls around my head (butcher, baker, greengrocer, corner-store, milk-bar), as it is in the types of places I look for examples of these shops. I search the High Streets and the Main Streets; eschewing the arcades and the shopping malls. I am from the generation who went down the street to buy necessities, not to the mall for a ‘shopping experience’.
| Rue Saint-Louis, Ile Saint-Louis |
Is it possible to discern a difference between butcher shops in my Parisian haunts and butcher shops here at home? My experience is that super-marchês in Paris are smaller, meaning that the meat sections are also smaller, resulting in the survival of more stand-a-lone butcher shops, la boucherie. In Paris, La Boucherie takes one’s breath away the instant the hearth is crossed.
| Left: Rue du Bac Right: Rue de Bourgogne |
Finding a stand-a-lone butcher shop in a ribbon development in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney has been a struggle. It seems that butcher shops are now within malls, like Westfield, or within major grocery supermarkets, like Woollies and Coles. In my mind whirls a faded memory of blue-striped aprons, smoothed and hollowed chopping blocks, massive hooks, sawdust, and missing fingers, or fingers swathed in band-aids (cloth not plastic).
| Oxford Street, Paddington |
Just as the cuts of meat from assorted animals have altered over the years, so has the ratio of cut to packaged meat. Windows are now replete with a myriad of spiced sausages, seasoned rissoles, and marinaded kebabs. Gone is the tray of wavering tripe, the aerated liver, and the poops of kidney. ‘Offal is awful’ seems to have consigned these ‘cuts’ to the dustbin of history.
| Left: Rue Caulaincourt, Montmartre, 18eme Right: Hampden Road, Artarmon |
However, there is one distinct similarity between a butcher shop in Paris and its equivalent in Sydney - and this could be in the eye of the beholder, especially should that beholder be a 'harker'. Butchers are proud individuals who really care about the image of solidity that they present to their customers, to the service that they provide for their customers, and the image of their shop in their neighbourhood. Butchers are pillars of their community.
| Bellevue Road, Bellevue Hill |
