Remembering the High Street

A Nostalgic Look at Famous Names

Gordon Thorburn

• Publisher: Pen & Sword
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844680986
• eBook ISBN: 9781844689248
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A nostalgic trip down the British high street, remembering once famous names such as Woolworths, Athena and C&A and also featuring current favorites, including the ubiquitous Tesco and Marks & Spencer which started life as a penny market stall to become a retail giant that has had to adapt to survive. Full of fact boxes and quirky facts about much-loved shops and the people behind them just who was W.H. Smith and what did those famous initials stand for? A fascinating book which charts the rise and, in too many cases, fall of our favorite shops.There used to be butcher, baker, grocer, greengrocer, draper, Boots, ironmonger (hardware), pub, WH Smith, cafe, bank, Freeman Hardy and Willis, jeweler, Marks and Spencer, furniture shop, hotel, bookseller, off license, haberdasher, Woolworth's, confectioner, cobbler, tobacconist, electrical showroom, Burton's, gas showroom, ladies' fashions, gentlemen's outfitters, and more, and maybe a department store, and several versions of some. What do we have now? Pound shop, charity (thrift) shop, building society branch, betting shop, coffee shop, charity shop, shop boarded up, building society branch, sandwich shop, shop boarded up, kebab takeaway, charity shop, card shop, Indian takeaway, mobile phone shop - we exaggerate but make the point. So what has gone wrong - if it is wrong? The author discusses these and many other topics, and answers hundreds of burning questions. Whatever happened to the Home and Colonial, Timothy White's, Lipton's, the District Bank, the Fifty Shilling Tailor? Who were Jesse Boot, Montague Burton, W H Smith? How did the Co-op start? Whatever happened to all those things we used to buy in those shops in the high street - Balkan Sobranie, Caley Tray, Oxydol, Phillips Stick-a-soles, Icilma Cream, Mansion Polish, Mrs Peek's Puddings? Does any girl still dream of going to work in her Maidenform bra?

CHAPTER 1

How the first-ever shop
led to M&S

The first-ever shop had no staff, no till, no shelves, although it might have had a kind of trolley. Representatives of Tribe A, who were hunters and had a surplus of game at the moment, went to the accustomed spot with their bag and laid it out on the ground. They gave a call, or blew a horn, to advertise their wares, then retired to a safe distance.

Representatives of Tribe B, who were farmers and metal workers, summoned by the call, came forward to inspect the goods on offer, with no interference from sales people or other gobby types. Tribe B had brought with them some sacks of grain, some arrow-heads and a few spears. Judging what they believed to be the value of the meat lying there, and trying to restrain their salivating imaginations from a feast of roast wild boar and barbecued dodo, they placed on the ground their consideration of price, in grain and sharp metal, and retired behind some suitable trees.

The men of Tribe A came forth and looked at the offer. One fellow was for accepting it, another thought it a bleeding liberty, two more thought it was almost but not quite. They picked up one dodo and retired. The men of B, knowing what their wives would say if they didn’t bring home all the bacon, stepped forward, put a couple more arrow-heads down, and went behind their trees.

The A team added the dodo again, with an extra squirrel as a mark of good faith, gathered up the corn and the weaponry, and disappeared into the undergrowth. The B men went back to a delighted village and all dined happily ever after. This very formal kind of shopping, called ‘silent trade’ or ‘dumb barter’, was practised until fairly recently in uncivilised parts and may still be.

Closer contact between traders may result in even greater formality. The Maoris, for instance, had a system of trade not unlike our exchange of presents at Christmas. We want to be lavish with our giving and often go beyond what we can really afford, so that Brownie points may be accumulated. There is always the danger that we as recipients may not see our new scarf as quite the quid pro quo for the diamond brooch or the half dozen of Lafite, but never mind. It is better to give than to receive. The same quandary was often encountered by the Maoris, who would compete for generous reputation in their giving but still needed to keep the exchange of fish for vegetables in line with the household budget.

Meanwhile, in other societies, the goal was gain, not prestige through munificence, and so the best hagglers and shrewdest dealmakers were the ones who grew rich according to local criteria and got their prestige that way. You could also find a kind of two-tier tradition in shopping, where the bargaining for certain high classes of goods was conducted formally and ceremonially, while that for life’s necessities was the usual rude scrabble for advantage.

Such scrabbling led naturally to forms of currency. While value might be set on strings of beads, quantities of salt or red feathers and hooli-hooli skirts, these were not true currencies unless all other goods could be valued in their terms and all in a society recognised them as having that value. You want a cow? That’ll be twenty strings of beads. You want a pint of milk? Two blue beads and a yellow, please.

In Europe, lumps of metal became a sort of money, valued according to weight. The pound, libra pondo, a certain weight of bronze, became the Roman standard in early days, and it was but a short step from lugging masses of bronze about to the idea of much smaller and more convenient pieces of rarer metals, authorised as genuine by the Emperor’s head depicted thereon. The gold solidus, Latin for whole, true or entire, became the definitive Roman coin, at first divided into twenty-five denarii and later twelve.

As is the way of things, money and prices went in opposite directions over the years, and Charlemagne (742–814) had to abandon the gold standard, settling instead for 240 denarii cut from a pound weight of silver, an idea he may have copied from King Offa of Mercia, as central England was then known, who had silver pennies circulating by 760. There was no pound coin, obviously, it being too heavy for any purse, and no shilling or solidus either, but these terms were used in accounting. And the rest, as Offa or Charlemagne might have predicted, was pure Libra, Solidus, Denarius, until some idiot turned it all into pees.

Mercor, mercatus, mercari

The Latin verb to trade, deal in, buy, from which in English we get market and merchant, is one of the evolutionary verbal strands that has led to our high streets and market squares. Sceoppa, Anglo- Saxon, a booth, a lean-to, related to scipen, a cattle shed (shippon), gives us the other strand.

The original shop (or sceoppa) was a workshop. In Saxon times, all consumer goods were hand-made by individual craftsmen, so the potter threw his pots in his lean-to and the smith had the same set-up in his booth.

Later, in more luxurious times, when trades had developed to suit the requirements of the moderately wealthy town dweller, if you wanted a pair of gloves, a hat, a pair of shoes, a cooking pot, a nice doublet and hose for your daughter’s wedding, you went to the glover’s or the shoemaker’s or the tailor’s house, where he had his place of work. If he was very good at his craft and therefore had a secure and busy trade, he would also have a space where he might show some things he had made earlier. These might be for sale, or to show patterns and skills, or both.

‘Shop’ can still mean place of work today, for instance in a factory that has specialised departments such as a machine shop or a paint shop. When we talk shop, it’s only about British Home Stores or Asda if we happen to work there. In some parts of the country, where the local dialect is nearer the original Viking/Saxon than it is in the BBC, shop can also mean place of residence. Even so, by and large we mean a retailing store when we say shop, which in turn means that the space the craftsman allowed for showing his work has taken over entirely.

Of course there were other ways of buying pots and hats. A pedlar might come to your door. For manufactured goods as opposed to food and everyday consumables, you could go to the annual or twice-yearly fair. Fairs were markets on the grand scale. You knew when they would occur, you knew what would be for sale, and you made every effort to get there.

Markets, by definition placeswhere buyers and sellers assembled, knowing that each other would be there at a certain time, were more frequent and more local. The woman with the eggs, the farmer with his meat or his vegetables, didn’t want to travel far nor, indeed, could afford to take more than a day off production work to go to market, sell the produce and buy whatever was needed from the other stall-holders.

This was all very well as a system for rural and small-town Britain. Large-town Britain wanted markets every day except Sunday. As the population increased and business thrived in urban centres, selling had to become a trade of its own and the place of sale had to become permanent.

It’s worth looking at the birth and growth of these urban centres. We’ll use Leeds as an example, not because it’s unique or even unusual, but because it’s typical. The same sorts of things that happened in Leeds, hub of a mighty cloth-producing region, happened in Birmingham (metal-bashing), Newcastle (coal and ships), Liverpool (sea trade), Sheffield (more metal-bashing), Manchester (more cloth) and all the rest of the industrial giants that started as nothing special but became convenient for wealth production.

The Venerable Bede mentioned Leeds (Loidis) in passing, in his History of the English Church and People c. 730AD, but the first hard evidence of what it was like in early days is in the Domesday Book, 1086. Leeds (Ledes by then) was an unremarkable agricultural settlement, important above its station because of the ford across the River Aire where the bridge (or brig) at the bottom of Briggate now is. The Domesday scribes recorded ten carucates, six bovates of land suitable for royal taxing (eight bovates in a carucate, as eny fule kno, altogether roughly 1,000 acres or 400 hectares), held by twenty-seven villeins, four sokemen and four bordars. These were peasants of several ranks, the bordar being the lowest of the low, all subservient to the lord of the manor as his tenants and all rendering service to him in payment for the use of his bovates.

There was also a church with a priest, a water mill, and some meadowland. The whole lot of Leeds in 1086 was deemed to be worth £7 a year. This is an amount of revenue almost impossible to evaluate in modern terms. Something like £100,000 would not be far out, or very approximately £100 of our money per acre, which goes to show how productive you were when farming with oxhauled ploughs and sowing and reaping by hand.

No mention of cloth-making then, but by the 1300s there was a bridge over the ford and cloth merchants were displaying their wares on it. Leeds was on the up, and by 1560 the heart of the modern city was beginning to show, with Briggate the primary street, Kirkgate below and Upper and Lower Head Row above and heading off for York, and a narrow lane where Vicar Lane now is. There was a second river in the open then, variously called Adel Beck and Sheepscar Beck, flowing more or less where Sheepscar Street runs today.

In 1725, Daniel Defoe found a ‘large, wealthy and prosperous town’, and a Portuguese visitor around the same time much admired the shops and the quantity and variety of food coming in. An American visitor in 1777 saw that Leeds had ‘many wellfilled shops, and various trades; its principal business in narrow and coarse woollen cloths, consigned to foreign orders’. Weavers would bring their weekly output to the cloth market, later the purpose-built cloth hall, where they’d sell to merchants and other middlemen.

At the start of the nineteenth century, when the population of Leeds was around the 20,000 mark, there was a market each week for livestock and another for wheat, barley and oats. Food and general provisions were sold twice a week, as was cloth. Only fifty years later, with a population grown three or four times, the business folk of Leeds had transformed everything. The provisions market was off the street and into a market hall, as were meat and fish, and there was a special building for general goods. Corn was bought and sold in a corn exchange, and trade in securities had been brought out of the coffee houses into a stock exchange.

Charles Dickens didn’t like it, though. Some eighty years after that American, and despite a comfortable night at the boarding-house which is now the Scarbrough pub, he thought Leeds ‘an odious place’. He was offended by the chimneys that marked the scores of woollen mills and the three dozen flax mills.

In Defoe’s time the population had been about 15,000; by 1861 there were that many in Irish immigrants alone, then the Russian Jews came and, by the start of the First World War, Leeds was approaching half a million people.

Got safe to Leeds took an Omnibus which carried us to an Inn. Here we stopt till Monday. Leeds is a fine town, but very dirty and dusty, and so was the Inn. It was markett day, we could see the stalls out of our window, as we drove along in the Omnibus, I saw a great number of shoestalls; I concluded it was of no use to count them, for they increased as we went. I think there was not so much earthenware as at Hull, one stall before the Inn had oranges and lemons to sell. I went out and bought two oranges for sixpence: they were fine large ones.

The young author of this diary entry, Sarah Ellis, travelled from Hull to Selby by boat, and from Selby to Leeds by railway (her first time), in 1815. The picture was taken soon after Lewis’s opened in the Headrow in 1932.

In the evening went with Mrs. S. and E. to see a Bazzaar; it was like going into a large hall fill’d with shops, some for toys, some with caps and collars etc., some with jewelry, and various things besides. We walk’d round the bottom part, then ascended the stairs, which was in like manner occupied; one person had a very long shop. I thought she must look sharp when she was at one end, that she was not rob’d at the other. I purchased a pair of chamber Bellows here, as I wishd for something to remember Leeds. It was getting so dusky I was troubled to see. Mrs. S. made some little purchase, I think a pair of salts; we then return’d to the Inn, and found the markett which we had to pass thro – very busy.

Around Dickens’s time and later, a massive change happened in our cities. The higgledy-piggledy, as-and-when maze of dwellings and alleyways of the typical city centre was being cleared and replaced by broad streets and factories, banks, warehouses, offices and shops. In Leeds, you could walk along Boar Lane or Briggate and see all kinds of wares for sale, displayed with every incentive to buy, behind large plate-glass windows. Messrs Pullan had their ‘Central Shawl and Mantle Warehouse’ on the corner (mantle as in cloak, not mantle as in gas), next to Bissington’s shoe shop. Elsewhere Mr Whitehouse would repair your watch, Bostock’s the chemist would supply your medicinal requirements, as would Taylor’s.

In Bradford in 1843 a petition in favour of incorporation as a borough was signed by, among many others, 2,100 shopkeepers, and the petition against by 1,003, but there was no thought yet, there or in Leeds, of a Schofield’s, or a Lewis’s, nor any other department store, and no thought either of a penny bazaar, run by a Lithuanian called Michael Marks, or a tiny herbalist/chemist’s shop, run by a Nottinghamshire farmer’s son called Jesse Boot, turning into a glamorous store on every high street in every large town in the country. The first hint of what was to come could be observed by the far-sighted in the expansion of a certain bookseller, newsagent and stationer, galloping along beside the railways: W H Smith.

The Greeks and Romans had shops. Often, they were part of what we would now call a development. A new public building, or even a grand private residence, would incorporate small shops open to the street (we might call them units), the rent from which would defray public expenditure or enrich the private resident in question. Many of our own high street shops came about in the same way.

A stroll past The Grove Hotel and into Spring Gardens in Buxton in the 1880s would have revealed a number of integral units, built to a standard design but occupied variously by C Adams, Practical Boot and Shoe Maker; H Newbold, Draper, Hosier, Mercer and Glover; J Shelmerdine, Fruiterer Etc; E Glauert, Watchmaker and Jeweller; Tomlinson Bromley & Co., Chemists; E White, Tobacconist, Wholesale and Retail Cigar Merchant; Trehearn & Hallifield, Stationers & Newsagents, and so on and so on. In 1863, as part of his strategy of constant improvement to Buxton’s facilities as a spa resort, the Duke of Devonshire built the Hot Baths Colonnade, a row of eight shops, all with planning permission.

The great Buxton building boom occurred over a relatively short time, fuelled by the Victorians’ love of spas, and a quick whizz through the town leaves one with the impression of an architectural unity, massively expressed in stone. Sidmouth, south-east Devon, evolved more gently and over a longer time, from fishing village to holiday resort, which may explain why a walk along Fore Street and the rest of the town centre in Victorian years would have had something in common with a similar walk now. Henry Bartlett, Fresh Fish Daily, has disappeared from Church Street, and J Spencer no longer offers donkey carts and bath chairs for hire, while Culverwell’s stationers and fancy goods lives on only in memory and in The Sidmouth Herald. Lake’s Seed and Canine Stores is gone, and Tedbury’s butcher’s, and Veale’s wine merchant’s, and A C Drewe, Purveyor of English Meat. There’s a Tesco convenience store at the top of the high street that was a newsagent, a Co-op in the middle, a Lidl and a Waitrose on the outskirts, but Hayman’s butcher’s is still there, and Skinner’s dairy, Potbury’s furniture store, and John Field’s little draper’s shop is twenty times the size as the famous department store.

In the late 1800s, department stores and chains of specialised stores followed the lead of W H Smith, enabled by the novelty of a national transport system of railways and better roads. Such things had not been possible earlier, at any rate. The business just wasn’t there. In 1800, there was nowhere in Britain, outside London, with a population of 100,000, but in the ten years from 1821, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Bradford and Sheffield all grew by an average of 50 per cent. By 1891 there were twenty-three places in England and Wales with populations over 100,000, and over 30 per cent of all our people lived in them and the capital. Almost 20 per cent of Scots lived in Glasgow.

Looking from the market place up Old Fore Street in Sidmouth, around 1960, the view is very similar to today’s, except...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: How the first-ever shop led to M&S
• Chapter 2: Once upon a time in Goole
• Chapter 3: Great shopsters of the High Street
• Chapter 4: Where did it all go wrong?
• Index