Grantham, Lincolnshire

Everywhere in chains

Where William Henry Smith (stationer) and Jesse Boot (chemist) began, the other chain retailers followed. In the late-19th and 20th centuries, countless high street shops belonged to chain store companies, who aimed to have a branch in every town and to corner the market in their specialist area, ensuring that a shopper in Brighton could travel to Bradford and find some* if not all of the same familiar names: Montague Burton (‘the tailor of taste’), Freeman, Hardy and Willis (shoes), MacFisheries, and the various grocers and dairymen – Sainsbury’s, Lipton’s, Home and Colonial, Maypole. So many have gone now, victims of takeovers or losers in the wars of commercial competition. But now and then a bit of a shopfront, a sign, or a threshold mosaic like the one in my photograph hangs on to remind us of their former presence. Not just ghost signs, wall-emblazoned faded phantoms of former glories, but also these resilient threshold brandings. Look down in any high street, and you’re likely to spot one or two.

So here in Grantham is a reminder of Maypole Dairy, The company began in 1891 and by 1918 they had 889 branches. Their formula was simple: stock a very small range of the dairy products that ordinary people bought all the time: milk, butter, margarine, eggs, tea. At first they did well, but profits fell after World War I and they were taken over by Home and Colonial, although the stores kept their old name; there were still Maypole shops until the end of the 1960s.

The shops were small but stylish. They had tiled interiors (sometimes with pictorial tiles) and gilded lettering in the name signs. Most of that has gone, but a number of these threshold mosaics can be found. The one in Grantham is typical. The letterforms, with their forked terminations to the strokes, have a touch of late-Victorian whimsy about them, even a touch of Art Nouveau. If you look at those terminations closely you can see little ovals, as if they are made of tree branches that have been sawn to size. Arranging the tiny tesserae to make the letters (each of which has a surrounding border of even tinier tesserae), the central flower and leaf, and the background pattern, took both skill and time. But a century ago and more, this was a standard way of branding a shop exterior. Over 60 years after the last Maypole closed, this one is still putting recent shop entrances to shame.

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* Although not all chains had nationwide coverage: some stuck to their local area, some covered the north but not the south and vice versa.

Cambridge

Curves

Shopfronts are not the most obvious items in the cornucopia that is the architecture of Cambridge, but here is one that pulled me up short as I walked around the town in the rain last week. My first response to this building in Market Street was a question: could this really be an original art nouveau frontage? The glorious collection of curves described by its carved woodwork certainly seemed to point that way and I guessed that it was late art nouveau, a survival from perhaps the early 1920s. When I got home and looked it up, I found that the building's official listing put it at c 1910, whereas Kathryn A Morrison in her excellent English Shops and Shopping dates it to c 1923, when the front was made for Stetchworth Dairies.

The front repays a close look. The woodwork above the door is a stunning collection of stylized foliage and multiple curves that turn back on themselves in a way that we're now more used to seeing in Paris or Brussels than in England and the flowers and stems in the glass echo these curves beautifully. The door and the wooden panels on either side take up the theme of curves too, as does the extraordinary metalwork.

The building must have made a remarkable diary. The front seems to have been designed to catch the eye more effectively than the display of eggs, cream, butter, and cheese in the window. If it's not perhaps as effective in its new role fronting a gift shop (it seems to cry out for a more sensitive sign than the one currently in place), at least it is in use, a curvaceous and exotic reminder of the skill with which which shops were designed and fitted out in the days when frontages like this were made to last.

Coptic Street, London

Cream of Bloomsbury

This building at the corner of Coptic Street and Little Russell Street in Bloomsbury is well known as the second restaurant to open in the Pizza Express chain. But the beautiful lettering high up on the wall proclaims its earlier history as the premises of the Dairy Supply Company. It dates from 1888 and was designed by R P Whellock, an architect I know nothing about – if you have any information about him, do please leave a comment.

In the dairy on Coptic Street, Whellock put in big, round-headed windows on the ground floor – these were apparently typical of the architecture favoured by the Dairy Supply Company. Original diary tiles are preserved inside, too. Outside, the mix of coloured bricks and the other details are typical of the period, but this lettering with its interweaving foliage helps the building stand out above the crowd. A reminder that there were once dairies all over the capital and another reason to look up in London.

Crouch Hill, London

The White Stuff

I travel regularly to Central Europe, and one of the pleasures of going there is the long and rich tradition of decorating the external walls of buildings. Why should wall painting be for indoors only? In the Czech Republic fresco and sgraffito abound on medieval, Renaissance, and baroque buildings, and their subjects tell stories, recall past owners, or act as testimony to religious devotion.

The efforts of these artists sometimes make me wish that more English buildings bore this kind of decoration. A few from the late-19th century do. This one, the Old Dairy on Crouch Hill, still bears a stunning series of seven panels in red and white fresco. Dating from around 1890, they illustrate the dairying process, from grazing and milking, through cooling and butter-making, to delivery, and were commissioned by the Friern Manor Dairy to give their premises a new public face. The artist is unknown.

There is, of course, something idealized about these frescoes. They’re a form of advertising, after all, and the dairy clearly had an interest in making us imagine pretty milkmaids, shining milk churns, and idyllic rural settings. But they’re well drawn, with cows, horses, and indeed buildings, that one can believe in and that could teach city children who’d not seen a cow something about where their milk and butter came from. Making a rather ordinary city street extraordinary, they can teach us a thing or two.