What Are Retail Ruins?

This chapter introduces concepts and theories for understanding retail ruins and ruination, including recent research on industrial ruins, ‘new ruins’ and specific forms like ‘ruins in reverse’. The chapter introduces the complexities of these emerging conversations, as well as the thought of Walter Benjamin, who was not only one of the first theorists of spectacle, but also one of the first to study retail ruins with his unfinished master work The Arcades Project. His work presages both the construction of the society of the spectacle in the post-war period and its demise at the turn of the new century. The chapter draws on lines of connection between his work and other recent approaches to the study of ruins and ruination, specifically approaches in contemporary archaeology that link space, subjectivity and the passage of time in unique and powerful ways. Lastly, these trends overlap and correspond with the ‘spectral turn’ and hauntology as a deconstructive practice that guides a way through some of the difficulties found in this emerging body of work. The final section is on methodology and the ‘question of context’ that situates the fieldwork site of Newcastle upon Tyne.