Newport, Shropshire

In the sun

As a sequel to my post in August about a splendid 19th-century shopfront on a Georgian building in Newport, Shropshire, here’s another shopfront, this time from the 20th century. The building behind and above the shopfront is interesting in its own right, but for what is hidden from the street as much as what can be seen. The brickwork above the shop window is Georgian, as in my previous post, but this time it’s an 18th-century refacing of an earlier building. What is behind is apparently a 17th-century structure that incorporates an earlier, 16th-century, timber-framed building – a palimpsest of periods that’s typical of English towns, though the accumulation is often hidden from the casual passer-by.

But as I’ve already hinted, it was the shopfront that made me stop and stare. This seems to be a shining example of Art Deco, the style of decoration and architecture that flourished from about 1925 to the start of World War II. So we have a glazed door with a pleasing pattern of panes, all neatness and straight lines. But what’s going on above is more remarkable. The transom, the glazing bar that separates the large lower part of the shop window from the part at the top, rather than being a straight horizontal as is usually the case, describes a gentle continuous curve, reaching its highest point in the centre of the shopfront, above the doorway.

The glazing in the upper section of the window (the transom light, as it’s called) makes three very graphic patterns of clear glass, frosted glass, and leading – in the centre, a sunburst (a classic Art Deco motif) and on either side a more angular, geometrical version of the same design. How revolutionary and modern this must have looked in around 1930. How redolent of its era, a time of glamorous cinemas, brightly coloured fabrics, and Clarice Cliff ‘Bizarre’ coffee sets, it seems today.

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.

Devizes, Wiltshire

Boot’s Corner

One result of spending some time thinking and writing about the history of shops is that one becomes aware of the way different multiple stores liked to design their shop fronts – the light oak window frames of W. H. Smith, the muted, modernised neo-classicism of Marks and Spencer, and so on. Among the best of the bunch were a number of Boot’s branches in town centres, which were often placed on corner sites and sometimes adorned with statues of famous historical figures with a local connection. When I looked up at the corner of St John’s Street and Wine Street in Devizes, it wasn’t long before I guessed I was looking at a former branch of Boot’s.

In the 19th century, Boot’s began to diversify their range beyond the company’s core pharmaceutical products, taking in everything from cosmetics to photographic processing. As a result, they needed larger stores, often with room for an upper sales floor. They also chose corner positions to take advantage of higher footfall and shop windows facing in two different directions. The Devizes branch was one such corner shop, with the added feature of a round tower to emphasize the building and turn it into something of a landmark.

Then there were the portrait busts in roundels on the upper walls. Some of the more spectacular Boot’s stores (for example, in Newcastle, Derby, and Bury St Edmunds), boasted full-length statues. The Devizes branch, in a smaller town, made do with busts, but they’re still impressive. The busts form part of a decorative scheme involving very fancy window surrounds, running even to putti beneath the top-floor windows, and pilasters that extend up the full height of the building. The busts, set in garlands, are at the tops of the pilasters. The two busts in my photograph portray Hubert de Burgh and Edward I. Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent in the early 13th century, fought alongside Richard I during the third crusade, encouraged King John to add his seal to Magna Carta and became chief Justiciar of England. However, his enemies brought about his removal from office and he found himself imprisoned – in Devizes Castle, which is how his portrait came to be displayed on the walls of the Boot’s store in the town. The reason for Edward I’s presence here may be that the town sent two representatives to this king’s 1295 parliament, the so-called Model Parliament, because it set the precedent of boroughs sending two representatives to Westminster; for some historians, this makes the Model Parliament the first such representative assembly in England’s history.

One gets the impression, looking at the decoration on this building’s facade, that it was built to last and that Boot’s intended to occupy the store for an extended period of time. Although they no longer do, the facade remains as a reminder of the times when retailers put real effort into the design and construction of their shops, making the country’s numerous ‘Boot’s Corners’ a pleasure to look at.

Yoxford, Suffolk

Corner shop

I didn’t know what to expect in Yoxford, apart from a picturesque thatched shelter on the main road (the A12), the sight of which encouraged me to stop and have a look round. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this, a small shop with a split architectural personality of a kind I’d not seen before. To the front is a white-painted brick wall with sash windows above and an attractive bright red 19th-century shopfront below. The Ionic pilasters that frame the shopfront are made of cast iron – a common material for Victorian shopfronts, although less common now – more and more of these symbols of Victorian innovation and pragmatism disappear every year.*

But, having quickly taken my photograph before the Morris Minor roared off, I found it hard to take my eyes off the side wall, which boasts a succession of stepped gables and Tudor-arched windows, mostly in glowing 19th-century red brick but with stone dressings. If this all seems rather grand for a small shop, an odd backdrop for the waste bin, plastic trays and old signboards that keep it company, the reason is not so hard to guess when you’re there. Just to the right of this showy bit of brickwork is a pair of brick gate lodges in a similar style. They form one of the entrances to Cockfield Hall, a grand house just outside the village.† What a pleasant way for a local bigwig to enhance the villagescape – far preferable to the demolition jobs committed by some landowners to rid their neighbourhood of ‘unsightly’ nearby houses, pubs or shops. Long may the shop prosper.

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* This one should not disappear as the building is listed.

† Alas I did not take photographs of Cockfield Hall or the cottage ornée in its grounds, as the weather rapidly turned nasty and sent me on my way. A reason to return.