The best thing about Morrison's book is that it steers absolutely clear of sentiment or nostalgia. This is no misty-eyed lament for some perceived golden age of shopping when men wore long aprons and women little bonnets and the butcher's boy, whistling on his bicycle, delivered your Sunday joint. There's none of that Mary Poppins nonsense here. For Morrison, a tiny medieval shopfront in Lavenham is no more or less relevant than a modernist post-war open precinct in Coventry or Stevenage, or a titanic out-of-town mall such as Manchester's Trafford Centre or Kent's Bluewater. For her, the shopping environment is a continuum. There is no false moment, stated or implied, at which nice old stuff becomes nasty new stuff. To her - and to us - it is all interesting. This book does what it says on the cover.

As with any shop, you take what you want from it. You might have idly wondered when the first true self-service supermarket arrived. Morrison directs you to the food department of Marks and Spencer in Wood Green, North London, dates it to January 1948, and gives you a picture. But she also reminds you how self-service retailing goes back much further in the United States, where the key reference is apparently Clarence Saunders' Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis in 1916. The first purpose-built English department store? No, not Selfridge's or Whiteleys, but the Bon Marché in Brixton, which opened in 1877. It's a pub now.

Or you might have wondered what was the first real shopping centre. That's trickier - modern malls evolved from arcades, which in turn evolved from ordinary streets, and what is a marketplace but a shopping centre, after all? But Morrison can help you. The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells was a purpose-built colonnaded pedestrian retail precinct begun in 1698, while the Royal Exchange in the City of London, modeled by Sir Thomas Gresham on its equivalent in Antwerp, was first built in 1566-8 and with its 120 shops and booths "housed London's first fashionable shopping promenade". So was that the birth of leisure shopping? Probably, though another antecedent for both the modern department store and shopping centre is the slightly mysterious medieval building type known as the "seld". First documented in Winchester in 1148, a seld was a lot of traders gathered in one large building - often behind a row of conventional shops - rather than being out in the open air. A seld off Cheapside in London contained 4,000 pitches for individual traders.

It must have been a smelly business, because by the time Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, built his "New Exchange" off London's Strand in 1609 - devoted to luxury goods such as books, lace, hats and perfumes - he had to draft rules dictating that the shopkeepers would not "throw or pour out into the walk or range or out at any of the windows any piss or other noisome thing". It worked up to a point - fashionable leisure-shoppers such as Samuel Pepys headed straight for the New Exchange. It helped that most of the shopkeepers were females who sold their goods with the assistance of outrageous flirting and glasses of wine. Needless to say, accusations of immorality soon followed, and some of these proto-shopping centres came to be regarded as brothels.