Hexham, Northumberland

 

Welcome intervention

I’ve written before about the many positive contributions to British culture made over the centuries by those who arrived on these shores as refugees.* Perhaps the contribution to architecture and design that has been most celebrated over the last 90 or so years was that of the numerous Jewish architects, designers, and craftspeople whose flight from Nazism brought them to Britain. But there have been so many others. One group that is not widely known nowadays is made up of the Belgians who came here after the fall of their country in the first year of World War I. The numbers were vast, their impact was varied, and when I visited Hexham I saw one building where it shows.

One craftsman who settled in the area was Joseph or Josephus Ceulemans, a woodcarver.† While in Hexham he restored Hexham Abbey’s medieval font cover, which had fallen to pieces, providing intricate carving to complement what was left of the original. More of his work is visible on a shop in Fore Street. In Ceulemans’ time this was Gibson’s the chemist, where a collection of Flemish and French books had been assembled so that the refugees, many of whom initially spoke no English, had something to read. Ceulemans lavished his carving skills on the shop front, adding a profusion of vine leaves and bunches ofd grapes above one doorway (top photograph) and creating a carved tribute to Philip Gibson, Freeman of the City of London, above the shop sign (lower photograph). There is also carved foliage of various kinds and several coats of arms.

The variety of decoration found on surviving Victorian and early-20th century shop fronts is extraordinary, from Gothic arches to Classical columns, cast ironwork to colourful tiles. Wood, however, is the main material for shop fronts of this date, and few are as decorative, or ornamented with such lavishness, as this one. Another Belgian refugee commented on his and his friends’ plight: ‘We find nothing to occupy ourselves …and this idleness weighs upon us.’ Some, though, like Joseph Ceulemans, did find things to do and this carving marks a turning point in a craftsman’s life. Forced to leave his homeland, he was trying to be as active as he could in his craft (keeping his hand in, as we say), while also, no doubt, paying a tribute to the local people who made him welcome.

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* For one piece I have written about the positive impact of settlers from overseas, see this blog post from 2014.

† I am indebted to the website of the Allen Valleys Local History Group for information about Joseph Ceulemans.

Newport, Shropshire

Gilded glamour

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.

The complete frontage: Georgian above, Victorian below

Oxford

 

Magic flutes

A few weeks ago I found myself talking to another author about the demise of second hand bookshops (victims of internet sales and the now-common shops that sell used books for charity) and the similar disappearance of music shops. Since we were near Oxford at the time, we spoke of a couple of music shops in the city that had disappeared. As I’d forgotten their names, my interlocutor put me right. ‘There was Taphouse’s in Magdalen street, and Russell Acott in the High Street,’ he reminded me. ‘And even a stall selling second hand records in the covered market,’ I added.

Later, I remembered that I’d actually taken some photographs of the shop front of Russell Acott’s in the High Street, because of its charming carved decoration.* How could one not taken a second, or third, look at carved musical putti blowing flutes† and playing other instruments such as the horn or the lyre? Especially when some of them are accompanied by tiny scrolls inscribed with the date of the frontage: 1912. And when they are surrounded by crisply carved foliage. And when the carver has made the putti more animated and distinctive by giving them a strong three-dimensional quality – look how the knees are set forward, the hands stick out from the surface of the carving, and the feet break out of the space between the arches.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll get the impression that I really like this kind of thing. I particularly admire the quality of the craftsmanship, the way in which the carvings fit the kind of business, the fact that this sort of thing is strictly unnecessary but the shop owner wanted their facade to be especially elegant, and the way in which the carving combines advertising with a kind of generosity – the public street was enhanced by this bit of whimsy. In my opinion, it still is.

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* This shopfront was created by Acott’s, who merged with another music business, Russell’s, in 1950. The company traded from this shop until 1998, when they moved to an out-of-town location. Russell Acott finally ceased trading in 2011, competition from online sellers meaning that when the owners retired, the business closed for good.

† Or are they piccolos?

Nottingham

 

The long view

Among the multitude of things that pop up on social media, one I take notice of is a blog produced by Historic England. For each post it takes a theme or an architectural style and gives a handful of outstanding examples. The theme the other day was Art Nouveau architecture in England, and I was pleased to see that Historic England’s gurus had picked four of my personal favourites: the elegant if eccentric Turkey Café in Leicester (all pale stripes and gobblers), the Royal Arcade in Norwich (with its air of Edwardian luxury) and the glorious former printing works of Everard’s in Bristol (with a facade that illustrates two luminaries of the craft of printing, Johannes Gutenberg and William Morris). All of these have featured on this blog in the past and all, by the way, are adorned with tiles designed by W. J. Neatby of Royal Doulton. However, another favourite of mine selected by Historic England was a building I’ve not blogged until now.

When I last passed by this imposing shop in the centre of Nottingham, it was a branch of the women’s clothes store Zara. It started out as something quite different, because it belonged to Boot’s the chemist – in fact it was their largest Nottingham branch in the early 1900s when it was built. As Boot’s was a Nottingham company, it was what modern retailers might called their flagship store. The upper part of the building at first glance looks like a baroque palace, with a dome to make the corner into a landmark. However some of the detailing, including the youthful figures hat support the balcony and cornices, together with some of the terracotta foliage, and the gently swelling columns that frame some of the window openings, are all of their time. It’s the ground-level shop front, though, that really looks Art Nouveau. This was the style of the sinuous curve, and the wooden window frames have curves in abundance, especially in the transom lights, the upper sections of the window, which have heart-shaped and tear-shaped panes, supported by a framework that’s both curvaceous and richly carved. Looking up as one enters, a similar pattern of glazing bars , this time with mirror glass, fills the ceiling, making the lobbies lighter.

It’s a lavish design, showing how Boot’s and their architect, Albert Nelson Bromley, made a special effort for this important store. The building was subdivided to accommodate the company’s variety of departments – everything from photographic processing to a lending library, as well as Boot’s core business of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, but this interior was reconstructed in 1972 after the chemists had vacated the building. The shop front remains, showing how it was built to last by a company that, unlike so many modern retailers who put up flimsy frontages because they known everything will be redesigned in a few years, took the long view.

Looking up in the lobby, Boots, Nottingham (now Zara)

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

High Street heroes

At first glance, this striking shop front is confusing, first because it’s not the 17th-century building it might appear to be and secondly because the premises are occupied by W. H. Smith, a company once known for ornate facades. But it wasn’t built by Smith’s. Originally, this was a branch of Boot’s the chemist, who could also put on a bold front. In the early years of the 20th century, Boot’s did a number of revamped shop fronts using timber framing with ornate plaster infill, and some of these were festooned with eyecatching details such as carved bargeboards, fancy brackets, and even statuary.

I’ve long been a fan of the large former Boot’s in the middle of Derby, which is on a prominent corner site and has a succession of statues of local Derbyshire worthies that must be almost life-size. The former Boot’s in my photograph, in Bury St Edmunds, is smaller, but equally ornate, with a full compliment of woodcarving, pargetting, and four large statues. The design dates to 1910 and was the work of the company’s in-house architect, Michael Vyne Treleaven, who set this style for their shopfronts in this period.*

The statues set in decorated niches across the facade were the work of a London sculptor, Gilbert Seale & Co of Camberwell, who did more than one job for the company. They feature, from left to right, Agricola, St Edmund, Edward I, and Edward VI. These figures all have local relevance as well as their wider significance: Edmund was the local saint, Edward I held parliaments here, Edward VI founded a local grammar school, and the Roman general Agricola led his people’s conquest of Britain and crushed the uprising of Boudica, local queen of the Iceni; one source suggests that this figure is actually another Roman general, Trebonius, who accompanied Caesar on his Gaulish and British campaigns. Boot’s the chemist, under its gifted owner Jesse Boot and his successors, was well aware of the benefits of local publicity, and was keen too that his premises should be assets to the towns where they were located. It would be wonderful if today’s retailers took such care over their architecture.

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* Thanks to the reader who confirmed that the design of the Bury shopfront was Treleaven’s.

Bridgwater, Somerset

A small triumph of design

While I was in Bridgwater a few weeks ago, I spotted this rather good shopfront that I’d never noticed before. How could I have missed it? Perhaps because on my previous trips to the town I was on the look out for what I was ’supposed’ to be looking at – the town’s outstanding early Georgian houses, say, or Castle House, the surprising early concrete building of 1851 that I wrote about in my previous post. But on this occasion I devoted part of my visit to aimless wandering, and was pleased with what I found.

This is a late-Victorian or early-20th century shop front with a deep entrance lobby and a very attractive sign. You’d have to go a fair way to find as good an example of a gilded shop sign of this sort – the bold, chunky lettering is attractively proportioned, highly legible, and well laid-out. When you look closely, the panels on either end are also very decorative. It’s not just the filigree ornament around the panels; the words ‘Silk mercer & draper’ reveal flared uprights and frilly terminations to virtually every letter and the two words on the top line are separated by a tiny star, as if to compensate for the rather tight word spacing. None of this compromises the legibility of the letters – the sign is easy to read from some distance away.

Shops signs like this, better by far than the majority of modern signs in terms of craftsmanship, clarity, visual quality and durability, are small triumphs of design. The ones that survive should be cherished, and I take off my hat to any shopkeeper (like several of those in the Worcestershire town of Upton on Severn) who keep the old sign while displaying their own business name elsewhere, in the window itself, perhaps. I hope when a new business takes on this empty building they’ll do likewise. 

Ledbury. Herefordshire

Well worth the trouble

The shops of F W Woolworth were a feature of British high streets until they closed, during the financial crisis, in 2008. Quite a few Woolworth’s shop fronts remain, albeit adapted with new signs and often new colour schemes. Once you get your eye in, you start to spot signs that a building used to be a Woolworth’s – floor mosaics by the door with the Woolworth’s ‘W in a diamond’ symbol, lion masks, sometimes the lovely early-20th century doors with polished finger-plates and kick-plates. Some of their fronts were Art Deco designs from the 1920s or 1930s, but the company also built neo-Georgian facades in some towns – perhaps mindful of the need to fit into streets where there was plenty of historic architecture.

That’s the case in Ledbury, where historic buildings abound and Woolworth’s built this brick frontage in 1937. Although I could see no floor mosaics or lions, the shop window, with its broad lobby, narrow mullions, and stall riser clad in polished granite are very much the kind of thing the Woolworth’s went in for. The glazing bars must have been repainted bright red – many Woolworth’s window frames were done in a bronze finish.

The neo-Georgian part above the shop window is neat and polite, in the sense that it doesn’t impinge on the character of the street, which includes a mix of Tudor timber-framed, Georgian, Victorian, and later buildings. A very Woolworth touch is that the sash windows have opaque glass, as usual for an upstairs floor in one of their stores, because the stockroom was generally on this floor. The company that took the shop over have knowingly capitalised on Woolworth’s heritage by adopting a similar name. They have been here a while now: no doubt their former Woolworth’s premises have proved a good home.

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For more on the history of Woolworth’s, see Kathryn Morrison’s excellent book Woolworth’s: 100 Years on the High Street, which I reviewed here.

Broseley, Shropshire

A short trip to tile heaven

With a bit of time on our hands in Broseley, the Resident Wise Woman and I had a wander around, heading in the direction of an interesting-looking spire as rain clouds gathered overhead. Suddenly, between houses, we spotted a tiny shopfront covered with a surprisingly colourful and rather miscellaneous collection of tiles. More tiles, more random still, covered the interior walls, glimpsed through the window. It looked like a butcher’s shop, but ‘M. DAVIS’ seemed no longer to be in business.

It crossed my mind that we might be looking at a recent assemblage of late-Victorian tiles, gathered together by a modern collector, but the condition of the tiles, the shop name, and the interior layout, seemed to suggest that they been there a long time. What could their story be?

An answer came thanks to Lynn Pearson’s excellent Tile Gazetteer (Richard Dennis, 2005). Apparently a local man, Matthew Davis, emigrated to South America in the 1890s, but thought better of it, returned home in short order, and set up as a butcher. He went to Maw’s factory in nearby Jackfield (heaven for tile worshippers), bought up a load of tiles from a heap outside the works, and employed someone to attach them to the front of the shop. The tiles may were no doubt from Maw’s equivalent of the bargain basement or seconds counter and this may explain their somewhat miscellaneous quality. The randomness, it’s said,* was made more random by the fact that the tiler often got drunk.

The result, says Lynn Pearson, is ‘happily eccentric’. I agree. The sight of this colourful shop front certainly improved my mood as the rain clouds gathered.

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* Lynn Pearson credits the archive of Michael Stratton, industrial archaeologist and one-time director of the Ironbridge Institute, for information about this building.

Castle Cary, Somerset

Mr White’s shop

Taking a step back to photograph the lovely Market House in Castle Cary, I bumped up against this delightful shopfront, which looks as if it dates from around 1900. The building itself has a date stone that suggests it was built in 1804, but the ironmonger Thomas White was not in business here until the late-19th or early-20th century (he appears on a list of local businesses in 1906). The tiling on the lower part of the shopfront (the stall riser is the term for this bit), especially the decorations on each end, is very much in the Art Nouveau style of c. 1890–1910. The lettering, though, isn’t in the highly curvaceous manner of some Art Nouveau scripts – it’s a bit more sober than that, appropriate perhaps for a business selling buckets and spades, pots and kettles.

White Ironmonger, Castle Cary, tiled stall riser

I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether this elegant tiling would have been invisible when the shop was open. Ironmongers have a traditional preference for reclaiming the pavement as an extra display area, populating the space in front of the frontage with large items such as dustbins and mop buckets. There was no mistaking what was on sale – you could see the stuff before you got anywhere near the shop. At the end of the day, though, when Thomas White brought in his stock and locked up for the night, his name was displayed, bright and clear, to remind everyone that tomorrow they’d be able to buy beeswax, wire wool, bells, and whistles – you should have known you needed them – right here.

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Tiles revealed

As a pendant to my previous post about my favourite Art Nouveau shop front in Cirencester, here’s a detail from another shop in the same town that I noticed recently. The tiles were revealed to me when I looked at this frontage closely for the first time. Again, the style of the tiles seems influenced by the Art Nouveau movement – the curvy forms, drawing on leaves, stalks, and perhaps flowers or sepals are typical of the period just after the year 1900.They form a lovely touch, probably not noticed by many, but they add a welcome a splash of colour and pattern to an already quite ornate frontage.

As you can see, even from my photograph of this small detail, the shop front has some elaborate woodwork – that carved pendant inside an openwork box resting on a scroll console, top right, is especially ornate. The window frame, too, features some impressive carpentry, including the curved and moulded glazing bars in the top part of the window, just visible in the upper left area of the photograph. More winning details on a little-noticed facade at the end of a busy shopping street. And the reflection in the window doubles the decoration – here’s to added value!

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Bonne année, art nouveau!

Some of my happiest half-hours have been spent in secondhand bookshops. It’s not just the possibility of picking up a bargain (though that appeals), nor the prospect of being among the most covetable stock in trade,* but above all the serendipity – you never know just what you are going to pick up, and the accidents of discovery in secondhand shops are so much more frequent and more surprising than in the usual shop selling new books, where you come across – surprise, surprise – what’s new, newly published, recently reviewed. A good secondhand bookshop can help you find books you didn’t know existed, didn’t know you wanted. Alan Hancox of Cheltenham, Thornton’s of Oxford, the old warehouse-like shop in Greenwich near the market: all were part of my education as well as perpetual sources of pleasure. And they are all gone now, and the world is diminished by their loss.

Secondhand bookselling is, of course, thriving online, and it’s a marvellous resource. But you search for things online, you tend not to find them accidentally. A small mercy (though they had their role in the demise of the other shops) are charity bookshops. If I’m in Cirencester, I always make for the Oxfam shop. It’s small, but I’ve made some good purchases there and these make me go back; I even sometimes donate books to them. I also like the architecture of this shop’s frontage. It’s wood, early-20th century, and in the Art Nouveau style.

To my mind the best features of this shop front are the lovely pane of curved glass on the left-hand end of the window, sweeping towards the door, and the slender glazing bars at the tops of the main panes. These glazing bars do curvaceous things in the very upper portion of the window where, in a Victorian shop window, there would be a horizontal band of frosted glass with lights concealed behind it. In fact, the irregularly shaped panes in the top part of this window probably were glazed differently – look at the two left-hand ones, which seem to have a milky-looking kind of glass in them. Perhaps the lighting in the window was arranged with bulbs just behind the pairs of half-roundels. However it worked, it’s splendid that the window survives, and that the shop it fronts is being put to such good use. Happy New Year!

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* Somebody (Melvyn Bragg?) compared the situation of secondhand booksellers to that of the vintners in Omar Khayam: Why would they want to sell their books at all? What more desirable things would they buy with the money they made?

London Wall, London

The red and the black

A lot of people like a fox. Attractively red-haired, bushy-tailed, and proverbially cunning, foxes capture our imagination somehow. They’re dog-like, but a bit wild. At least since the ancient Greeks* they’ve been admired for their resourcefulness. So if you’re actually called Fox, and you’re a shopkeeper, you must feel almost obliged to use the animal’s image in your publicity and on your shopfront. Like the wonderful Fox umbrella shop in London Wall. This is a delightful frontage that reflects the high fashion in retail architecture in the late-1930s. On one level, it’s very simple: just a plain rectangular window to set off the goods on display, a big name sign, the latest in black cladding – and the foxes, of course, on either side of the name.

But on another level this is a very elaborate and expensive confection. The metal window frames are stainless steel. The black cladding is Vitrolite, a coloured glass sheet material that was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s because it looked good, shed the dirt, and was available in the fashionable hues of the time – pink, eau de nil, black.† The windows had curved non-reflective glass. And that simple three-letter name plate is not so simple either. The steel letters light up at night thanks to neon tubes, also highly fashionable.

However, creating a good shopfront isn’t solely a matter of using the best, most fashionable materials. It’s also about arranging them artfully. The long rectangular window, for example, is a not quite as tall as many shop windows: this gives an almost cinematic feel, as well as allowing plenty of height for signage and the fascia, so that the short shop name can make its fully impact with large letters. Another artful touch is the way the steel letters of ‘FOX’ are edged in red, giving just a bit of colour during the day (there’s more at night, of course, with the neon lighting). Mr Fox’s shopfront is the bee’s knees.

The style of the shopfront reflected the quality of the products sold within. Apparently Winston Churchill used Fox umbrellas, and that personification of 1960s television style, the character John Steed in The Avengers, played by Patrick MacNee, carried an umbrella by Fox. The company still exists, though they no longer trade at London Wall.§ The premises are now given over to fine wines and dining, but the only concession to this is one line of signage below the shop name. The rest is still intact and glistening. Rain or shine.

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* The poet Archilochus has a fragment, variously translated, that contrasts the fox and the hedgehog: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, or words to that effect. And these days, foxes are all over greetings cards, on which they’re nearly as popular as hares.

† Vitrolite was used in the bathrooms at the Savoy Hotel. See my post here.

§ Fox are here.

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.

Uppingham, Rutland

Four candles

“Four candles,” says Ronnie Barker, starting off a chain of misunderstandings with his comedic partner Ronnie Corbett in one of the funniest sketches in British comedy. Corbett, behind the counter, is soon climbing stepladders, opening drawers, shifting boxes of goods, and sorting through a seemingly endless stock to find what his customer wants.† He is also evoking the world of the old-fashioned ironmonger.

Going back a few more decades, the Victorian ironmonger was one of the key people on the High Street. You could see his shop from far off because of the arrangement of buckets, bins, and brooms on the pavement outside. Coming closer, you would be able to make out rows of lamps in the window, a range of metal items such as kettles, pans, jelly moulds, and all kinds of other kitchen equipment. Then there would be tools, from hammers to saws, and all kinds of fancy work, like bell pushes and bird cages. The cavernous interior would be full of drawers and shelves, and in the gloaming beyond the front of the shop were larger items, such as tin baths and baby carriages, kitchen ranges and stoves. Somewhere in the rear would be a doorway leading to an outhouse full of farm equipment, such as the kind of plough that was often the ironmonger’s sign, and a forge where some of the stock was manufactured and where the proprietor would repair metal goods.

D Norton and Sons in the middle of Uppingham was probably like this once upon a time. It is still a cornucopia of gardening equipment and household goods and still has its 19th-century shop front, with a plough above the door and elegant classical columns on either side. I would like to ask my Uppingham correspondent to go up to those columns and tap them next time he passes by. When I was there I forgot to give them a tap to see if they produced the dull thud of stone and plaster or the ring of iron. I have posted before about an ironmonger’s shop with an iron facade, and I did wonder whether these were metal columns, but a commenter on this post says that he has tapped them, and that they feel like wood.

A lovely feature of this shop is the stained glass panels in the upper sections of the windows, advertising some of the goods and services on offer when the window was installed in the 19th century. The one on the right tells us that the proprietor was a “FURNISHING IRONMONGER”, which I take to mean that his stock was aimed mainly at the domestic market – whether fitting a kitchen range or supplying a canteen of cutlery, he would be your man. And on the left, there’s more: “GAS FITTER & BELL HANGER”. Does that mean church bells? The business of fitting door bells and the kinds of bell systems that Victorians with big houses used to summon their servants was more the usual line for ironmongers, but who knows? When the interior gleamed with oil or gas light, these stained-glass panels must have glowed, drawing the eye of passers-by on winter evenings.

Now shops like this also sell more up-to-date items such as bulbs and batteries. Part of a stick-on sign for the latter, a bygone of a more recent period, survives on this window, the blue suggesting the Ever-Ready brand. Its presence reminds me once again that there is so much more to look at in shop windows than the goods on display.

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† Or what he doesn’t want. What Barker is actually after, he soon reveals, are “Fork ‘andles. ‘Andles for forks.” And so the dialogue goes on.