Stephen Bayley: Is this the death of middle-market England?

Put it this way: do you know anyone who actually identifies with Vauxhall or M&S?

The great thing about the modern world is its exquisite gradations: the map of our appetites is as accurately delineated as the Ordnance Survey. Every nuance of preference is catered for. We judge by possessions because the things we own or desire betray us. The eyes may be the windows of the soul, but the credit-card statement is its synopsis.

The great thing about the modern world is its exquisite gradations: the map of our appetites is as accurately delineated as the Ordnance Survey. Every nuance of preference is catered for. We judge by possessions because the things we own or desire betray us. The eyes may be the windows of the soul, but the credit-card statement is its synopsis.

The great French gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." Just substitute the word "want" for "eat" and you have the position exactly. But people say that's now changing.

The fashionable riff among business types is that the middle market is disappearing, that the familiar, dependable and ordinary are being squeezed by discounted anonymous commodities at one end, and luxury labels at the other. Consumerism's categories were once as clearly defined as culture's, but all that may be changing, too.

A generation ago, it was as clear as OS contour lines. You had Skoda at the bottom, Ford in the middle and Jaguar at the top. Or in matters of dress, there was catalogue mail order for the proles, Marks & Spencer in the middle and, let's say, Jaeger for the managing director's chubby wife.

Citing the hammering M&S is getting from Gap, they say the market will be bipolar: sleazy discount outlets for the poor, and Paul Smith or DKNY for the rest. Hyundai and Audi are to be the heraldry of a them-and-us culture.

Or put it this way: do you know anyone who identifies with Vauxhall? Back at the table, the concept of Sunday lunch will be eaten by stuffed-crust, bike-delivered industrial pizzas bubbling up from culinary hell below and nibbled at by spatchcocked gamebirds athwart rosemary infused polenta from above.

But that's only one way of looking at it. What's really happening is that the middle ground is expanding and improving, rather than contracting.

Thirty-six years ago, Habitat began bringing furniture hitherto seen only in design books or in New York's Museum of Modern Art to the provincial high street.

Today, Skoda's sales are at record levels, but Skoda is no longer selling those rear-engined, Brezhnev-era rustbuckets. It is selling smart, desirable and beautifully conceived and executed Volkswagen clones, which happen to be made in a low-cost Euro-zone region that used to be known as Czechoslovakia. As if to emphasise le monde à l'envers, Skoda's chief designer has just been sent to sort out Bentley.

BMW, once the synecdoche of upper-middle-class values, is now mass market. M&S deserves its problems because it has been arrogant, philistine and insensitive for too long. So the mass market went elsewhere.

But while it is true that Ford or any other middle-brow vehicle brand may no longer wholly own the vast centre of the market, where competition is ferocious, it is also true - and much more significant - that the Ford Motor Company is completely reinventing itself. No longer a manufacturer of serviceable blue-collar cars, Ford is now the world's leading consumer-products company in the automobile sector.

You don't want a Ford? That's fine; you can have a Volvo or a Range Rover or a Jaguar instead. Ford owns them all, and, in a detail so telling it might as well be poetry, the Ford factory at Halewood on Merseyside that used to make the clunky old Ford Escort has now switched production to the gorgeous new baby Jaguar saloon. No one can keep track of how many hundreds of per cent Jaguar sales are up.

Again, there is an example from the world of entertainment. We used to have Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Now we have Tate Modern. In 1970, modern art was discussed only by consenting adults in seminar rooms: now it's prime-time. The middle market hasn't disappeared; it's just got higher aspirations.

This new and very demanding middle market blurs education and entertainment as readily as it scuffs the borders between commerce and culture. Emile Zola predicted this when he described Paris's new department store, the Bon Marché, as a "cathedral of commerce". Warhol had the same conceit when he said that stores would become museums and museums would become stores.

Gloomy conservatives will say that ultramontane high culture, once magnificently uncontaminated by cash or populism, has been dragged by global media and markets into the commercial middle ground, where high-octane capitalism has extinguished its exclusive characteristics. But that's just not the case, though the artist formerly known as Nigel Kennedy does present a philosophical problem.

Critical standards still apply. Happily, we now accept that "popular" music is worthy of "serious" appraisal, but that doesn't mean Céline Dion is better than Aretha Franklin, still less Jessye Norman. "But I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now" is a fine lyric, while "I want to fuck you like an animal" is not. Couture may well be an irrelevant bore, but Gap pants are better than Wal-Mart own-label.

Waitrose can sell you an Italian chardonnay for £6 that, to most people's tastes, is more delicious than a premier cru meursault costing £35. The new model of Ford Mondeo, a successor to the lumpen Cortina, is inferior probably only in snobbismo to the equivalent Mercedes-Benz.

The middle market hasn't disappeared; it just got smart.

sb@opinions.demon.co.uk