By Ellen Klavan, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, 01/99

ADDRESSES Department stores: Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Rd., Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7XL; tel. 0171-730-1234. Harvey Nichols, 109-125 Knightsbridge Rd., London SW1X 7RJ; tel. 0171-235-5000. Peter Jones, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8EL; tel. 0171-730-3434. General Trading Company, 144 Sloane St., London SW1X 9BL; tel. 0171-730-0411. Partridges, 132-134 Sloane St., London SW1X 9AT; tel. 0171-730-0651.

Before I moved to England five years ago, I assumed that all the stores in London were charming and picturesque little boutiques along the lines of the Laura Ashleys and the Crabtree and Evelyn shops you see in American malls.

I was right, in a sense: All the shops in London almost are branches of chains like Laura Ashley and Crabtree and Evelyn. The quaintness soon wears off as you visit high street after high street full of the same seven or eight boutiques. Depending on the status of the neighborhood, you're likely to find both Laura Ashley and Crabtree and Evelyn represented, along with a few international chains like the Gap and Benetton.

Then there's a spate of chain stores that are exclusive to the British isles: Monsoon, Miss Selfridge's, French Connection and a few others.

Each shop has its own ``look,'' which is the same on Kensington High Street as it is in a tiny village in the Cotswolds and the teeming heart of Birmingham.

The one great institution to be found on every high street in Britain is the sublime Marks and Spencer's. There you can buy a twin set for your grandmother and a heat-and-serve Chinese meal for your dinner party, all in one fell shopping trip. As far as I know, Marks and Sparks (as it is fondly known to habitues) is the only chain store in the world that combines reasonably priced clothing with specialty food items under one roof. For whatever reasons, it's a very successful marriage.

At the front of each store you'll find serviceable and sturdily manufactured men's and women's clothing -- skirts and blouses, trousers, neckties, undergarments and so on.

Although many shop at Marks and Spencer's, you can only admit to it if you follow a certain formula. For instance, let's say you're wearing a sweater from M&S and an acquaintance pays you a compliment, such as, ``What a nice jumper!'' You're required to respond, with a look of bewilderment and surprise, ``Marks and Spencer's!'' as if the last thing you expected to do, while walking through the clothing section of M&S toward the grocery section, was to stumble across this reasonably priced and very wearable sweater. Your friend must then nod knowingly as if to convey that she, too, has on occasion been booby trapped into buying something nice there.

At the back of the store or downstairs, depending on the size of the particular branch you're visiting, you'll find the food section. Here you suddenly leave behind the world of post-war economies and find yourself in a heavenly atmosphere of luxury and indulgence. Fresh fruits and vegetables are attractively displayed, a butcher stands waiting to hack up some chops for you, and freshly baked breads are steaming on wire racks in the bakery section.

There are also pre-basted chickens that just need to be popped into the oven, Brussels sprouts that are washed and ready to be boiled, sold with a dollop of butter to smear on top when they're sufficiently overcooked, and packs of assorted smelly cheeses to serve with tins of assorted biscuits.

In addition to grocery stores and boutiques, London boasts several world-class department stores. If you're in London, you will of course want to visit Harrods. Just to visit, mind you, as you would the National Gallery or the Tower of London. To actually spend money there would be a disastrous waste of your limited vacation resources. Leave the real shopping to the English upper classes and visitors from oil-rich nations to whom an umbrella with the Harrods' logo costing 200 pounds ($333.40US)is a mere bagatelle.

Instead, treat the store as a museum and tour its food halls, Egyptian hall and fabulous toy department with the reverence and awe they inspire.

Just down the road from Harrods, you may want to visit Harvey Nichols or Harvey Nicks as it's called by the ``Sloanies'' who shop there. Sloanies, or Sloane Rangers, are trust-fund babies who live around Sloane Square and spend their days shopping and talking on mobile phones to one another. Harvey Nichols is their natural meeting point, offering sleek, European-designed clothes and various elegant eating spaces at the top of the store.

Harvey Nicks has one of those layouts, like Bloomingdale's in New York City, that make it much easier to enter the store than to get out. I always get claustrophobic when I walk into the store, which is dark and womb-like to begin with, and am immediately sucked upstairs by an escalator that seems determined to deposit me in departments I have no interest in visiting.

Then, when I'm desperate for a breath of fresh air -- so desperate that I'm longing for the carbon monoxide-choked streets of Knightsbridge -- I find that I'm trapped in designer underwear and can't find the down escalator anywhere. My only choice is to keep going up, up, up and finally eat an expensive meal on the fifth floor.

It's a nightmare. Not at all like Peter Jones, my home away from home. Me and Peter Jones, we've got a thing going on. It's five stories of grotesquely ugly, post-war architecture marring to the point of destroying the Victorian charm of Chelsea's Sloane Square, and I love it. If Harrods is an over-sized Bonwit Teller and Harvey Nicks is a small-scale Bloomingdale's, then Peter Jones is a combination of Lord and Taylor and the late great Altman's. It has the same timeless, reliable predictability of those two New York institutions.

If, like a certain English friend of mine, you ever become so angry with your husband that you gather all your jewels into a sponge bag and pack up your baby and just leave, you can always go -- as she did -- to Peter Jones.

It's the one place in London where they have to take you in. In fact, everything about Peter Jones -- from its fussy voiles and chenilles in the ground floor fabric department to its leaden scones and piping hot pots of tea in the fifth floor coffee shop -- says ``mother'' to the weary shopper.

Not my mother, of course.

She is far more bohemian and adventurous than the mother that is Peter Jones. The Peter Jones mother is uniquely English. The store offers the kind of homey middle-class stodginess, a single strand of pearls at the throat propriety, whose best exemplar is probably the Queen Mum herself.

Peter Jones is a short hop, skip and a jump from the General Trading Company on Sloane Street. There you can find some of the few genuinely English gift items that are worth shelling out for. They've got rice paper picture frames and stationery made by Matthew Rice, the talented designer who's married to Emma Bridgewater, whose elegant pottery is also on sale in the store.

After the General Trading Company, if you're feeling homesick, you can always go next door to Partridges, the specialty food store where you can find all your favorite American delicacies. After that, I suggest you call it a shopping day and get back to your sightseeing.

(c) 1999, Ellen Klavan. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.