NextBackI remember spending half a weeks pocket money (3d – old pence) on a cream doughnut from Webbs (No.20) and Lloyds Bank was a door that I never dared pass through. Nor did the office of the East Worcestershire Waterworks Company hold me in its thrall – but I do remember being told that there was a gauge on the wall in there which showed the pressure in the company mains - water which was drawn from boreholes at Burcot near Bromsgrove.
Occasionally I visited Davis Newsagents (No.17) to buy a copy of The Dandy – you had to behave yourself in there because Miss Davies worked in there also taught the Reception Class at St Stephens Infant School on the corner of Peakman Street and Archer Road. She was, I recall from my Infant days, a strict disciplinarian who also taught our Sunday School Class. Each time you attended you received a coloured picture stamp which was stuck in a special book. If you were absent, for whatever reason, you didn’t get the stamp for that week – and that was it!
The enduring memory that I have of Mr Stylers (No.15) shop was not so much the contents rather the smell of his pipe tobacco. A small, corpulent man, he almost constantly smoked his pipe in the shop, when he wasn’t serving and the rich aroma of strong tobacco lingers down the years.
I once bought a kazoo from Mr Harry Harbons music shop at No. 14. It was an instrument that even a non musician like myself could play but it was the oddly shaped ocarina which was eternally in the window that fascinated me. How did you play it? – I have never found out!
If you look carefully at the 1950s picture of A D Foulkes (No.12) you can make out a tiled fireplace front in the window -
Mrs. France was right in her description of the Redditch Indicator Shop – I too found it to be an Aladdins Cave and even to this day I remain fascinated by office products such as files, copy paper etc.
Mr Tomlins Butcher Shop (No.9) was less familiar to me (my Mother bought our meat at Marsh and Baxters butchers in Market Place) – but I do remember him as a small cheery man, black hair slicked down and wearing a long white coat with a blue and white pin striped apron.
My only enduring memory of Mr. Golds, the vets was that the doors were painted green and there was a large shiny brass plate attached to one of them and memory of anything further north on the pavement is too scant to offer anything of value.
Today, the shops look like this....................
