Great minds…
The other night I was giving a talk about the history of the high street in Britain, illustrated with pictures of shops and shop fronts down the ages. After the talk, which was in Gloucestershire close to the border with Worcestershire, a member of the audience asked me if I’d seen the recently revealed old sign above a shop in Upton on Severn, not far away. She liked it, and thought I would too. As it happened, just a few weeks earlier, I had seen it and admired it. Great minds think alike.
The shop is now Sweet Daisy, an “old-fashioned” confectionery shop, with rows of jars containing sweet things. But the proprietors, or the owners of the building if they are different, have done a fine thing, and left the rather good old sign of a long-gone firm, the London Meat Company, exposed, it having been covered up for years as other businesses had occupied the building. The bold gold capital letters of the old Meat Company are an asset to the street. The sign still looks good surrounded by the bright red of the shop front, even if they’re not perhaps as bright and shiny as they were in their heyday. Which was when? I’d imagine the early-20th century, although the letters could be Victorian. The strips of green tiles with stylized flowers on them look Art Nouveau,* so perhaps the shop front and sign were done around 1900. Whatever its age, thank you Sweet Daisy for leaving the sign visible. No doubt its helps draw in the curious and paradoxically encourages the purchase of barley sugar, sherbet pips, humbugs, rhubarb and custard, Scottish tablet, and so on and on…
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*Which I omitted to photograph in close-up. Next time I’m passing…
Such a perfect sign and hurrah for the owners keeping it in all its glory instead of boarding it back over or taking it out and selling it on.
ReplyDeleteI had a look for the business on-line it apparently had it's origins as a market stall in the 1880's. It expanded operating at different markets and then moved into shops. So the shopsign is probably the 1890's or the first decade of the Twentieth Century. The business later changed it's name to Baxter's the Butchers.
ReplyDeleteIt is a lovely sign and it is good to see it preserved by the current shop owners.
This link gives some of the history of the company www.rushdenheritage.co.uk/commerce/baxters.html
ReplyDeleteStephen: Thank you. That's very informative. One of those companies that started in the late-19th century taking advantage of the long-distance refrigerated ships bringing meat from New Zealand etc: fascinating.
ReplyDeleteThe link in the above comment, by the way, takes the company's story up to the 1950s. The rest is the usual tale of mergers. It seems that the company was sold to Brooke Bond Oxo in 1974, before passing to Unilever in 1984. Unilever weren't interested in the butchery part of BBO, so passed it on to the Vestey company, where it presumably became part of their Dewhurst chain.
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