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The author studies the way we think about a street and its shops in cosmopolitan London. He prefers the “ordinary” to the “particular” and chooses as field study the most ordinary street possible with what he calls “radical empiricism” as paradigm. Contrary to expectation, only two small shops, the hairdresser’s and the hardware shop, are successful in creating a sense of the street, i.e., in turning it into a place of intense sociability. The other shops are on the decline. The working class does not identify themselves with places that they find too expensive. They prefer to shop in more geographically and socially remote supermarkets. The middle class does not regularly shop in small shops. They however defend them as corner shops for poorer classes. They prefer to go to the more select shops of posh shopping malls. There, they find a Victorian décor inspiring nostalgia on which they build their imagination. The author analyzes this imagination as a myth—in the anthropological sense—i.e., as a story able to resolve ideological contradictions. This story is also an urban aesthetics that must be studied to understand the “meaning of the town.”