Shops of the Circle

Bernie Ryman was sure of one thing. A. M. Oldham’s drapery, at 653 Kingstanding Road, “was the first shop to open at the circle Kingstanding in 1930”. It stayed open until nine at night, he wrote on Voices of Kingstanding, until the war made it close at six. A photograph shows his future wife, Josie, standing outside it with her mother.

Within a few years the Circle was ringed with mock-Tudor parades, the new estate’s high street built in the round. Our Kingstanding Circle page tells the story of the place. This one belongs to the shopkeepers, and to the customers who still remember them.

Walking round the Circle

In 2012 Richard Wall walked the Circle from memory, as it was around 1940. Coming up Kingstanding Road past the Municipal Bank, the first shop was Rochelle’s the butcher, then Harris’s cleaners and dyers, Clare’s post office and newsagent, Boots, Whitehouse’s grocery, Bates the seed merchant and the baker’s. Across Kings Road came Beresford’s electrical repairs and the Cozifit shoe shop, and round into Rough Road, Summers the barber. Then Parkes the greengrocer, a little shop that recharged wireless accumulators, the chip shop, Palmers’ sweets and tobacco, and Hodgeson’s the funeral directors. Along the dual carriageway stood Knights, the Co-op, a butcher’s and Roses the greengrocer; opposite, past the police station and the billiard hall, Knights’ cycle and toy shop, its big window empty all through the war because there was nothing to sell.

Butter cut with wire

Veronica Marshall had a Saturday job at John Favours, the grocer. She started on biscuits, which came in large metal boxes, with the broken ones sold by weight, and moved up to the Danish butter, which arrived in a wooden barrel and was cut with a wire, like the cheese. Arthur Thynne and his brother were Favours’ delivery boys, on bikes with a big wicker basket at the front. “Sometimes the bikes upturned and the contents got wet.” The manager, he remembered, was Jack Shorter.

Rochelle’s, on the corner, had a brightly painted country scene on the wall outside. Inside, Veronica remembered, you queued past sides of meat on a sawdust floor. The Rochelle brothers had two shops: Henry’s at the Circle and Fred’s on Kingstanding Road near Hawthorn Road. Baines the baker, she said, was one of the last shops to have farthings in its prices.

Divi numbers

The Co-op was the biggest shop on the Circle, and its customers have never forgotten their numbers. Richard Wall described the overhead wires: your money went into a metal cup with a ticket bearing your dividend number, a pull on a handle sent it whizzing across to the cash office, and your change came back the same way. His mother’s number was 131718. Bernie Ryman, at 86, still knew his: 171705. Helen Pallett remembered hers, 108982, and that the Co-op would head and gut a chicken while you waited.

Oldham’s, Palmers and Lennons

Shops changed hands and kept their old names in people’s heads. Bernie said Oldham’s was sold around 1949, when the Oldhams moved to Great Yarmouth; John Stuart Palmer wrote that his father ran the tobacconist next door, later Moore’s, then moved and bought Oldham’s. Gwen Clifford’s mother never called it anything but Oldham’s.

Lennons, the drapers round the corner in Rough Road, “sold everything you could think of”, one customer said. Stephen Morton worked there after school for Mr Lennon and his son Eric, and when he saved up for a Raleigh from Knights, Mr Lennon had a ride on it in front of the shop.

In 1966 the Kingstanding pub was pulled down and a precinct of 29 shops and a supermarket opened on its site. That precinct was itself cleared in 2020 for a Lidl. Round the corner, at 2 Rough Road, Lennon’s is still trading.

Then and now

19502018