Occasionally, the British let their stiff upper lips go slack. The collapse of Woolworth's and its closing down sale has provoked one such display. How can anyone feel nostalgia for a shoddily-run, shabbily-stocked business that retreated long ago from most people's lives and recklessly forfeited its once-respected place in British commerce and culture?

The obvious moment to get nostalgic about Woolworth's has long passed. The firm surrendered its place in British life in the Seventies, when it downscaled ambitions, withdrew from many locations, and narrowed its appeal to shoppers for whom the only virtue was its cheapness.

Maybe some of the sorrow masks a more powerful emotion: fear. The collapse of a big retailer in the middle of the Christmas shopping season is an almost unprecedented shock. It shows how bad the economic crisis is. It's like seeing Santa's P45.

Nostalgia, however, is never rationally controlled or nicely calculated. It is as blind as love and has no bottom line. When we try to rationalise it we call it "conservation" and link it to the quantifiable benefits of bio-diversity, say, or the tourist-value of "heritage". But a rare species of bat or beetle or a stately ruin are as uneconomical as an under-patronised shopping chain. We cling to them because they are parts of a past to which we, too, belong.

Though Woolies can mean little or nothing to most shoppers nowadays, those like me, who were children in London in the Fifties, remember a store worthy of nostalgia. To me, when I had pocket money to jingle, Woolworth's was an island of adventure. No other shop had that intriguing, crazily eclectic range of goods, piled in deep trays on every counter, where toys and treats, lipsticks and paper-clips, hardware and haberdashery jostled in colourful chaos.

You could handle the stuff, without obligation to buy - which, in those days, was a rare privilege. To me, Woolworth's was as exotic and exciting as a souk: aisles where you might be almost as likely to meet the Three Magi as Santa Claus, a place where suburban dreariness acquired an interesting, distracting texture, like a morally inoffensive amusement arcade.

Ageing makes us wistful for even the dimmest or most distressing childhoods. All over Britain, there are people who spent their first pocket money in Woolworth's or got their first 45rpm single there: it may have been Elvis, or - perish the thought - the future Sir Cliff. Boys and girls celebrated pubescence by going there for their first Brilliantine or their last bobby-socks.

Woolworth's was cheap. But that wasn't the attraction. There seemed nothing tawdry about it. The façade was as grand as any in the neighbourhood, with the long, scarlet fascia that proclaimed, with some dignity, "FW Woolworth & Co, Ltd" in elegant, bold, gold letters, over the broadest, brightest plate-glass windows in the high street.

Friendly but respectful young women in neat, chequered mob caps stood behind every counter to serve you. Everyone went there. Though what I suppose today's market researchers would call the "demographic" working-class, Woolworth's was like village cricket or the air-raid shelter: a place where British class rigidities relaxed. Woolworth's was everywhere, prominent in every high street, part of a widespread way of life.

Thrift was a bourgeois virtue in those days. Almost all women were united in being housewives. We spoke of "char ladies". The same cloth caps topped pigeon-fanciers and grouse-shooters. Common culture transcended class divisions and Woolies was part of that common culture, an emporium aimed at the "respectable" working class with whom their employers were happy to share shopping space.

In Woolworth's decline you can measure the way British society has changed. The old working class has succumbed to embourgeoisement. Shops with cross-class appeal, where you can save money without social derogation, now hug ring roads with enough parking space for the cars of the newly inscribed members of the middle class. In the gritty urban locations Woolworth's favoured, the old mixture of classes has vanished from the streets, and cut-price strategies aim at a new underclass, which is seriously poor, deprived and underprivileged.

Instead of creating the classless society John Major dreamed of, we have re-carved class divisions to be different but deeper, gouged by wider wealth gaps, enclosed in bigger ghettoes, and often exacerbated by racial tension and religious bigotry. In these circumstances there is no dishonour in recalling the old days affectionately.

Thus nostalgia for Woolies is like most nostalgia in modern Britain: stirred by fading memories of common culture. The nostalgia of my parents' generation was focused on the biggest common experience of all: the war, which, like Woolies in its heyday, suppressed class antagonisms. The camaraderie of the Blitz really was their finest hour, because they shared it with all other Londoners.

But a common culture lasted long after that. The television shows and hit tunes of the Sixties and Seventies may sometimes not have been very good. But people love them because they recall a time when everyone watched the same programmes, heard the same music and exchanged responses to the same experiences at the tea-break or in the pub. In the same way, while most big sports clubs nowadays are commercial enterprises no longer worthy of their fans, the huge investment of collective emotion still makes them hallowed.

People who find nostalgia for Woolworth's baffling are unacquainted with common culture. My students' generation cannot even know, from experience, what common culture is. They inhabit ghettoes of the like-minded in a world of fractured tastes and values, tuned to their channels of choice and Facebook friendships. In the classroom, it's hard to find topics of shared interest, outside the syllabus.

Without common culture there can be no national nostalgia. Soon we may have to start feeling nostalgic for that nostalgia, as it becomes an unrecoverable emotion.

Woolies may even be the one of the last cases to engage it on a grand scale. How sad is that?

* Felipe Fernández-Armesto is professor of history at Queen Mary College, London.

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