Portobello Road in the 50s

I was born in the 1950s so although I can’t remember much if anything about that era, because I was alive then it doesn’t seem to me like it should be described as the historical past. More like an annexe to the present. But looking at these pictures from 1958 demonstrates how far away from us the 50s are. No internet, no mobile phones, almost no television by comparison with today. Only a few subtle differences in this photograph could place it twenty years earlier.

North Kensington has not yet become a particularly bohemian or counter cultural area. These images are from the other side of a cultural divide. It’s a view of almost forgotten working class west London.

That’s Mr Brooks and his vegetable stall. A hard working photographer from the Ministry of Health took these photographs to illustrate a now forgotten display about food retailing. They would have been thrown away if the man who donated them to the Local Studies collection had not had been thinking of their value to later generations.

A little further down from Mr Brooks’ stall is a branch of the once ubiquitous Woolworth’s stores.

In this photo you can see the Electric Cinema looking a little grim but obviously open, one of the longest surviving institutions of Portobello Road. In 1958, according to that year’s Kelly’s it was trading as the Imperial Playhouse.

But fruit and vegetable stalls in gloomy streets are not the whole Portobello story even in the late 50s. The market even then was an outlet for antiques, bric a brac and other second hand goods as shown in another set  of photographs from the same period.

I think you can see a couple of penguin paperbacks on top of the pile of books.

I couldn’t resist including this one. Some kind of basket made out of a dead armadillo. Try getting one of those on e-Bay.

This set of photographs seem brighter and more optimistic to my 21^st century eye. Perhaps it’s just that they were taken on a sunny day or perhaps it’s the fact that the people in the pictures are not buying food but browsing for more interesting items.

The 1950s are still a long way off though. Look at this final image:

A trio of excited young women examine the contents of a stall selling jewellery. The detail that caught my eye was that all three are wearing gloves. So we’re still on the other side of that cultural divide.

The next time we go to the Portobello Road it will be to the 1970s a far more familiar era.

Thanks to the unknown Ministry photographer and to Corry Bevington who took the other photographs which are from the HistoryTalk collection.

King’s Road blues – part one

When I was writing the post about the World’s End a couple of weeks ago I came across the photograph below.

Right in the middle at number 475 you can see a shop called Sophisto-Cat (next to Decro-Cat of course). I’d been looking for a picture of that shop for ages and finally it had presented itself. Sopisto-Cat was the home of the now famous Christian the Lion who was bought at Harrods by two Australian men and kept at the shop in that devil may care sixties way. I showed this picture to interested parties and someone even remembered that she and her sister were always asking their mother to take them to see the lion sleeping in the window.

This set me off trawling through our collection of photographs in search of interesting views of the King’s Road around the same time 1970 so let’s go on a tour up and down Chelsea’s most famous street.

The next two pictures show the shops next to Sophisto-Cat:

Note the pre-decimal prices at Starways and the offer of new dresses for £1 at Quick Nicker. 475 and its neighbours were soon demolished. This view from 1972 of the Guinness Trust Buildings shows the towers of the World’s End estate under construction although the end of the terrace above is still in place.

Further west we see another defunct building Kings Road Junk City. A large and anonymous red brick office block stands on the site today

Further along you find this parade of shops including the engagingly named El Cheapo

This is followed by the still existing Furniture Cave building, today looking much smarter and very much greener in colour than it did in the 1970s.

Stanley Bridge visible in the distance marks the border of Chelsea so now we have to do a virtual u-turn and head back eastwards.

We’ve passed the World’s End now and the next picture shows the parade of shops on the Cremorne Estate.

The branch of Woolworth’s is long gone but the Portch Brothers butchers were there until comparatively recently.

This photo shows the construction of Moravian Tower at what was then 343-379 King’s Road. The building was a Council block of flats for many years until problems with the infrastructure of the building made it uneconomical to repair. It was sold to a property company and now has the far less evocative name 355 King’s Road. The Tower took its name from The Moravian Chapel and Burial Ground located directly behind it.

This brings us back to Christian the Lion. The burial ground was where he exercised when he wasn’t dozing at Sophisto-Cat. I can’t mention the Moravian Burial Ground without also mentioning the urban myth associated with it. Because the headstones are flush with the ground and appear to be quite close together a rumour grew that the Moravians were buried vertically. Every so often we get a query about this so I should state for the record that as far as I know the deceased inhabitants of the burial ground were laid to rest in a conventional manner. The positioning of the headstones probably related to the desire for a simple and unadorned burial marker. The fact that this arrangement is also convenient for the exercise of big cats is entirely coincidental.

I haven’t got us very far along the King’s Road but time travel can’t be rushed. I’ll continue next week but to get us as far as Beaufort Street at least here are another couple of images:

329 and 331 King’s Road, now home to Just Kitchens and the Azteca Resturant. Just beyond Beaufort Street on the north side is the Bluebird Garage building. Once the home of the largest and one of the first petrol stations in the country, it is now devoted to a number of upmarket food /consumer outlets. But in the early seventies it was an ambulance station.

Next week we will push on to the heart of the King’s Road at the height of its fame as a fashionable shopping destination.

This is the first of a number of virtual trips along the streets of Kensington and Chelsea so let me know if there are any other streets you’d like to see.

The famous fish shop

Philip Norman’s 1905 book “London vanished and vanishing” describes a “quaint building…four doors west of a tavern called the Rising Sun”.  It was Maunder’s fish shop and its address was 72 Cheyne Walk according to the 1889 edition of Kelly’s Chelsea Directory. The shop had been demolished by the time of Norman’s book but he had painted it.

The interesting thing for me is that he wasn’t the only one, and Elizabeth Maunder’s modest establishment was painted, sketched, etched and photographed in its time. Here is a painting by Alice Boyd:

Here is a drawing by Percy Thomas:

And here is an etching by William Burgess from his collection “Bits of Old Chelsea”:

Burgess was a talented engraver and watercolourist who created many images of Chelsea. I’ll devote a whole post to him sometime soon; this picture has one of his characteristic touches which I will explain then. See if you can guess what I mean. Finally here is a photograph of the building just before its sale and demolition.

I can’t say why all these artists felt compelled to depict Mrs Maunder’s shop. Why are certain places recorded for us while others are lost and forgotten – vanished as Philip Norman puts it? One thing is sure, that none of these images could have been created until the artists had the space to step back from the shop, which they wouldn’t have had until the creation of Chelsea Embankment. Before Maunder’s had a address in Cheyne Walk it was located in Lombard Street one of a pair of streets between Beaufort Place and Cheyne Walk (the other was Duke Street) both of which were partly demolished to make way for the Embankment. This small stretch of riverside Chelsea has been recorded in numerous formats. On the river side was the rear of several buildings including the Adam and Eve tavern shown here in a photograph by James Hedderly but also depicted by Burgess and other local artist including Walter Greaves. (We’ll come back to him at a later date)

On the land side were the two narrow streets of shops and taverns. This view is east to west with Beaufort Place, now Beaufort Street just visible in the distance.

From the other direction the streets look like this:

You can see Arch House at the end creating a narrow tunnel which leads to Cheyne Walk. And if you look carefully at the buildings on the left you can just about make out the fish shop again.

I can’t tell you anything about Mrs Elizabeth Maunder. Trading fish before refrigeration must have been a little unpleasant for the shopkeeper and the customer but you have to think it was a popular shop for a while at least, and Mrs Maunder must have had a tolerant disposition to put up with all those artists forever drawing or painting.  If we could get the Local Studies Time Machine going she’d probably be pleased to see us. Lombard Street / Duke Street is one of those forgotten streets I would have like to walk down.

Mrs Maunder’s shop was demolished in 1892 but lives on, possibly the most depicted shop in Chelsea.

I know some of you like me appreciate the facilty to zoom in on the details of old photographs so here is a close-up of Duke Street looking west. Although the image is blurred you can still make out some interesting features.

The lost department store

The great days of the department store are probably over. There are survivors including two of the best known, Harrods in Kensington and Peter Jones in Chelsea. But the time when every city and every large London suburb had its own individual department store is gone.

The old names are not forgotten. In Kensington High Street the two great buildings which were home to the two department stores Barker’s and Derry and Tom’s are still there. The Barker’s building has a number of retail businesses and is also home to Associated Newspapers. The Derry and Toms building contains three separate stores and of course the Roof Garden is still a going concern. The Roof Garden deserves a post of its own and we’ll come back to it at a later point.

But I remember a third store on Kensington High Street as I’m sure many others will. I was dragged through all three of them by my parents at some point in the late 1960s. I remember the roof garden of course, a pushy salesman trying to foist a nasty pullover on me (my mother resisted all his efforts) and a fascinating vacuum tube payment system which sucked your money away at an alarming speed and returned your change just as quickly. That happened I think in the third of the great stores of Kensington High Street – Ponting’s.

Here are two photos from 1971 of the arcade which leads to Kensington High Street tube showing on one side an entrance to Derry and Tom’s (now the side entrance to Marks and Spencer) and on the other the display windows of Ponting’s.

As you can see, the Grand Removal Sale has already begun.  So what did Ponting’s look  like? This photo is from the 1950s.

The “House for Value” was located on the corner of Wright’s Lane. Twenty or so years later the sign is still in place but the closing down sale is on.

Note the sign for the roof garden in the top left of the picture.

Inside Ponting’s everything was for sale.

Some departments were busier than others.

By this point the House of Fraser owned all three stores. The John Barker Company had acquired Ponting’s in 1907 and Derry and Tom’s in 1920. It was they who built the architecturally demanding Derry and Tom’s building (1929-31, with the Roof Garden being completed in 1938) along with their own flagship building (1936 -1958 work being interrupted by the war). Ponting’s also had many improvements and some expansion but was never quite as prestigious as its two neighbours. It was the first to go, a victim of House of Fraser’s rationalisation programme in 1970. Derry and Tom’s followed shortly afterwards in 1973 but the building remains. After a short spell as the Kensington Super Store the Ponting’s main building was redeveloped in 1976-78.  The only section remaining is the building around the station arcade where La Senza and Accessorize are currently located. (Ironically it was the expense of developing the western side of the arcade which took the original business into liquidation.)

When I first started working in Kensington High Street I had to do some research to even work out where it had been. But although it is now lost many still remember the golden age of shopping on Kensington High Street.  Here is a Ponting’s invoice from 1930:

And finally an image of Pontings from an even earlier time, an interior from 1913 when retail therapy as we know it was still in its infancy.

Next week I’ll be doing another vanished shop, but quite a different one from Ponting’s.