Melbourne, Derbyshire

Tracing history

The High Street renews itself all the time. Old shops get makeovers, new businesses come along, and with each change a fresh signboard goes up. Sometimes, though, it’s just the sign that’s changed, or a coat of paint that’s added. And if that’s the case, part of the old shop front stays to tell us something about the history of the building. I like the way fragments of old decoration, bits of moulding, a pane of glass high up in a window, can drop quiet hints about a shop’s previous occupants. Tiles, among the most durable of decorations, sometimes linger in this way, and here are a couple of neighbouring examples in Melbourne, Derbyshire.

I don’t know exactly when these shop fronts were tiled, but I’d guess in the Edwardian period – the designs seem to bear that influence of Art Nouveau that I often saw in the tiled surrounds of Edwardian fireplaces when I lived in London. Back in the early-20th century, firms such as Minton and Doulton were producing millions of tiles that brought a bit of colour – and a sense of hygiene – to the High Street. Butchers, dairies, grocers, and fishmongers were among their most enthusiastic customers. They liked the bright, easy-care surfaces, which were often continued inside the shop.

On many early shops there was often a blurring of the boundary between inside and outside. Butchers, for example, would hang meat on rails in front of the window, and both butchers and fishmongers had opening shop windows, enabling customers to see the goods or talk to the proprietor without even stepping inside. The right-hand shop in the picture has an opening sash window, and probably once sold meat or fish.

Few High Streets have complete surviving Edwardian shops like the ones lovingly reconstructed in the BBC’s Turn Back Time series. But in many towns there are fragments like these strips of tiling, which afford colourful glimpses of the history of the High Street.

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For readers interested in Melbourne, there's a post about its wonderful Norman church, here.
For more on tiled shop fronts, see a post about a street in Cheltenham, here.

Charing Cross Road, London

Striking a light

Small-town shopkeepers like those in the excellent Turn Back Time: The High Street didn’t usually have shop fronts with the full complement of glittering effects that were sometimes seen in the Victorian period. But in London is was a different story. Where there were hundreds of shops competing for one’s attention, Victorian shop designers did everything they could to catch the eye of potential customers – bright colours, lots of lights, gilding, and lavish displays of goods.

Painted glass, often with mirror effects, was a favourite material for shop names, numbers, and glittering descriptions of the goods on sale, especially in the second half of the 19th century. Passing fashions and the fragility of glass mean that few of these dazzling signs have survived. Some of the best loved are on the umbrella shop in New Oxford Street that I blogged about a while back. This is another, on Smith’s tobacconists in Charing Cross Road. This was apparently the first shop to open when this stretch of the street was redeveloped at the end of the 1860s. The sparkling glass welcomes cigar-smokers in particular, as it did in the 19th century, testimony to the Victorian shopkeeper’s skill at attracting the notice and the money of those who passed by.

Witney, Oxfordshire

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 few posts on shops this month, in the spirit of spreading information about this neglected aspect of architecture – and in the cause of unashamed pluggery.

The Victorian High Street could be a dangerous place, where bakers laboured in dingy back rooms, using flour adulterated with alum, and where grocers happily sold cheese coloured with copper sulphate. They did all this with a grand flourish of showmanship, and this love of show was sometimes reflected in extravagant shop fronts. Ironmongers liked to set off their vast and bewildering stock (everything from nails and screws to grates and stoves) with a good-looking frontage. There are still a few of these around, including two magnificent Victorian shop fronts in Witney. Originally made for ironmongers, these fronts are made, appropriately enough, of cast iron.


They’re a matching pair, at opposite ends of the town, and made around 1870–1880 by some unsung foundry. At the top of each frontage are intricate diamond shapes linked together and enclosing rosettes. Up each shaft winds twining foliage. Delicate scrolls twirl across the corners of the glazing. This feast of decoration must have amazed the Victorian shoppers of Witney, and must have drawn people towards Leigh’s at one end of the town, by the green, and Thomas Clark and Son at the other end, in the High Street. Neither of the shops is now an ironmonger’s, but these stunning iron frontages still house businesses – a bakery and an estate agent – that contribute to a vibrant and busy High Street.