Turn Back Time, BBC One: a history of our shops – from John Lewis to dodgy sweets
What was it like to go shopping a hundred years ago? A new BBC One series finds out.
www.telegraph.co.uk By Olly Grant
TURN BACK TIME: The Devlin family recreate an Edwardian bakery on BBC One Photo: BBC
Good gracious, Shepton Mallet is buzzing: I’ve just spotted a shopper on the high street. Sorry, Sheptonites. I don’t mean to be rude. But desperate times call for a little honesty. And, sadly, these are tough times for Shepton: this beautiful Somerset town, once abuzz with commercial activity, is now lined with empty shops.
Haven't quite done your research Mr Olly Grant, a new wave of businesses have already moved in and doing well....Antique, vintage shops, Artisan and Deli's and more on the horizon ! footfall is being generated by the independents own advertising.........more footfall is welcomed! and lots of opportunity's for leasing shops like ours www.no21.co.uk
Haven't quite done your research Mr Olly Grant, a new wave of businesses have already moved in and doing well....Antique, vintage shops, Artisan and Deli's and more on the horizon ! footfall is being generated by the independents own advertising.........more footfall is welcomed! and lots of opportunity's for leasing shops like ours www.no21.co.uk
But imagine a different scenario – one in which Shepton’s historic market square is restored to its former glory. One in which a group of modern shopkeepers and their families don the clobber of yesteryear and transform those empty stores into thriving businesses full of angelica, tallow candles and pig trotters.
This seems like a good opportunity to test a well-worn theory about the past – namely, that it was a sepia-tinted paradise of personalised service in which apple-cheeked youths fetched your shopping and shelves were crammed with nothing but honest, home-spun quality. So I’m off to 1960s Shepton to find out.
First, a question for production manager Jane Atkinson, who meets me in the High Street by a pub that’s advertising an “80s extravaganza!” on a big plastic banner (not sure that’s in the spirit of the experiment). Why does the series run from the 1870s to the 1970s?
“Because the start of the modern high street was really the 1870s,” she says. “That was when a lot of our big brands started to exist – Sainsbury’s, for example.” People are often surprised, Atkinson says, by the longevity of brands. Nivea arrived with the Edwardians. Vaseline was patented in 1872. John Lewis opened in 1864. (Coincidentally, Lewis himself was born in Shepton, just off the High Street.)
And the 1970s? That, apparently, was when the decline began. Not that Turn Back Time will be indulging in much hand-wringing. “We’re not a social commentator on the fact that big brands have kicked out small shops,” Atkinson insists. “This is really about what we’ve had and lost. And one lesson is that it wasn’t always bad to lose certain things. Shops struggled to cope with rising demand, for example.”
You’ll see evidence of this in the first episode, when one local complains of queuing “for 10 minutes” for his Victorian groceries. He’d have been even more aghast to learn how Victorians tweaked their wares to encourage saleability: iron sulphate to spruce up the pickles, Prussian blue to green the tea, mercury to enhance the sweeties.
I pop into the 1960s general store and find it rather lost-looking: an odd hash of knick-knacks, game compendiums, Combi Chefs, and a lone mackerel lying disconsolately on the meat counter. Sergison’s Grocer, meanwhile, is a blaze of neatly stacked, mass-produced food in gaudy packaging: jelly babies, Babycham, Smash, and something called Frostie Cake.
Karl Sergison, who’s running the grocer’s, isn’t a fan. “I preferred the Edwardian period,” he says, which is not something you often hear from a 47 year-old. “I liked the pomp and circumstance of service, the etiquette.” What’s flying off the shelves in the 1960s? “Booze,” he says. Some things never change.
So why is the British high street suffering in the 21st century? Many locals I speak to blame Shepton’s town centre woes on Tesco; it built a superstore at the far end of town in 2006. Online shopping and the recession have also taken their toll.
Sergison, however (who in real life runs a deli), believes there are reasons to be hopeful about the future of high street shops. “If you think about it,” he says, “home deliveries had stopped in the 1960s. Now all the modern shops do them. Maybe the nation is realising that it wants both: service and convenience.” He pauses. “I actually think there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I think we’re on our way back.”
Then he checks himself. “Of course,” he adds, “I’m a 1960s grocer so I shouldn’t know that, should I?”
Turn Back Time begins on BBC One tomorrow at 9.00pm. More details are at www.bbc.co.uk/history/handsonhistory
First, a question for production manager Jane Atkinson, who meets me in the High Street by a pub that’s advertising an “80s extravaganza!” on a big plastic banner (not sure that’s in the spirit of the experiment). Why does the series run from the 1870s to the 1970s?
“Because the start of the modern high street was really the 1870s,” she says. “That was when a lot of our big brands started to exist – Sainsbury’s, for example.” People are often surprised, Atkinson says, by the longevity of brands. Nivea arrived with the Edwardians. Vaseline was patented in 1872. John Lewis opened in 1864. (Coincidentally, Lewis himself was born in Shepton, just off the High Street.)
And the 1970s? That, apparently, was when the decline began. Not that Turn Back Time will be indulging in much hand-wringing. “We’re not a social commentator on the fact that big brands have kicked out small shops,” Atkinson insists. “This is really about what we’ve had and lost. And one lesson is that it wasn’t always bad to lose certain things. Shops struggled to cope with rising demand, for example.”
You’ll see evidence of this in the first episode, when one local complains of queuing “for 10 minutes” for his Victorian groceries. He’d have been even more aghast to learn how Victorians tweaked their wares to encourage saleability: iron sulphate to spruce up the pickles, Prussian blue to green the tea, mercury to enhance the sweeties.
I pop into the 1960s general store and find it rather lost-looking: an odd hash of knick-knacks, game compendiums, Combi Chefs, and a lone mackerel lying disconsolately on the meat counter. Sergison’s Grocer, meanwhile, is a blaze of neatly stacked, mass-produced food in gaudy packaging: jelly babies, Babycham, Smash, and something called Frostie Cake.
Karl Sergison, who’s running the grocer’s, isn’t a fan. “I preferred the Edwardian period,” he says, which is not something you often hear from a 47 year-old. “I liked the pomp and circumstance of service, the etiquette.” What’s flying off the shelves in the 1960s? “Booze,” he says. Some things never change.
So why is the British high street suffering in the 21st century? Many locals I speak to blame Shepton’s town centre woes on Tesco; it built a superstore at the far end of town in 2006. Online shopping and the recession have also taken their toll.
Sergison, however (who in real life runs a deli), believes there are reasons to be hopeful about the future of high street shops. “If you think about it,” he says, “home deliveries had stopped in the 1960s. Now all the modern shops do them. Maybe the nation is realising that it wants both: service and convenience.” He pauses. “I actually think there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I think we’re on our way back.”
Then he checks himself. “Of course,” he adds, “I’m a 1960s grocer so I shouldn’t know that, should I?”
Turn Back Time begins on BBC One tomorrow at 9.00pm. More details are at www.bbc.co.uk/history/handsonhistory
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