The time-honoured advice to ‘look up’ when walking down a street in a town or city seems spot-on for the centre of Newport, Shropshire, where one can see good quality Georgian and earlier buildings standing proud above much later shop fronts. It’s also worth pausing to look at the shop fronts, though. This is one of the best. I don’t know its exact date, or what the business was that put it there, but I’d say it’s 1880s or 1890s, and the building’s listing descriptions concurs, with an estimate of ‘late 19th century’. By the end of the Victorian period, many High Street shops were being fitted with quite lavish fronts, as retailing became highly competitive and shopkeepers vied to catch the eye of everyone who passed by. Increasingly too, shopping was becoming a leisure activity for the middle classes and, as some of this leisure was window-shopping, the people behind the counter liked to put on a good show to lure the window-shoppers inside. Part of this tendency was also about glamour or exclusivity – a fine shop front projected an upmarket image.
The designer of this shop front was given the scope to produce something outstanding. Polished pink granite, a popular material in the 1880s and afterwards, was used for the pilaster running up the front on the left – the stoneworker added vertical flutes to the upper part for extra visual interest and an elaborate cartouche design above with scrolls and a green oval. Polished grey stone lines the sloping stall riser (the strip beneath the bottom of the windows) and the windows themselves are large and lined with only slender metal columns. The panes would have been smaller in the 19th century – the big sheets of plate glass that we see today are modern.
The really special part of the front is the central section, with a dark wooden glazed door and a stunning panel above. This panel with its gilded scrolls and putti, plus the ironwork, also partially gilded, beneath, oozes quality. I wonder if this was a jeweller’s shop, or if it belonged to a seller of some other type of luxury goods. My photograph of this centrepiece also shows another telling detail., The ceiling of the entrance lobby has a dark wooden frame holding four pieces of mirror glass. This was a cunning trick to make the doorway a little lighter, while also giving those entering the odd sensation of seeing the reflection of the tops of their heads. I’ve seen this trick at least once before, above the entrances to what was originally the big ‘flagship’ store of Boot’s the Chemist in Nottingham. In combination with the gilded putti and scrolls, this makes a stunning shopfront that must have impressed the people of Newport in the 1890s and still impresses me today.
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