English Buildings

Alas: Smith and Jones… In Chester in June last year I was trying to do what I do in a city I don’t know well: drifting around taking things ...

Everywhere in chains Where William Henry Smith (stationer) and Jesse Boot (chemist) began, the other chain retailers followed. In the late-1...

Small-scale Leeds (3): Start small, build big In 1884, Michael Marks, who had arrived shortly before as a refugee from the Russian Partiti...

Still there – just It must have been in the 1970s, when Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse came out, that I fir...

Colour in buildings Working on the book of the series Turn Back Time: The High Street last year focused my mind all too clearly on the pligh...

As the BBC1 series Turn Back Time: The High Street comes to an end next week, I am rounding off my series of shop posts by refreshing my ‘Te...

A substantial world Having in 1848 got the job of running book stalls on the stations of the London & North-Western Railway, W H Smith h...

Old principles, modern building From its 19th-century roots in the Rochdale, the co-operative movement grew rapidly in the Victorian and E...

Striking a light Small-town shopkeepers like those in the excellent Turn Back Time: The High Street didn’t usually have shop fronts with th...

Iron appeal BBC1’s series Turn Back Time: The High Street has now begun, and, as I wrote the book to go with series, there will be a fe...

In my undergraduate days you could get most things in Oxford’s Covered Market – fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, secondhand books and records...

One of the best products to come out of Oxford is Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. It was apparently first produced in 1874 when Cooper, a ...