So, back into the present. Here’s Whiting’s of Bootham, pictured last week. Or rather, where Whiting’s was.
There’s a ‘ghost’ of the former shopfront in the visible difference in the brick.
I’m no expert, but this looks like a sensitive restoration, with a bow window like those on either side, presumably specially made to match as this isn’t your standard window these days.
How it did look:
What I hadn’t noticed or thought about until I looked at this photo is that number 67 also shows the ghost of a shopfront in its brickwork. The city archives have a photo dating from around 1940. Number 67 is the last building visible before the front gardens of what is now the Churchill Hotel. According to the description, which I’m having some difficulty linking to at present, “Tyerman Sturdy’s chemist shop, Hannon’s fruiterers, Edmund Moat’s grocers and Coastal Fisheries” all feature on this photo.
Now that stretch from the corner of Bootham Crescent to the Churchill Hotel houses a Londis, a sandwich shop, and also a dry cleaners, in a shop inserted in number 75 at some point after the early 1940s, while 67 and 69 have lost theirs.
These buildings weren’t built as shops, but as houses. So Whiting’s is just returning to its original use. A reflection of changing needs and changing trends in shopping.
Perhaps we’ll see more and more examples of this, on the streets leading out of town, as more people shop in the out of town centres, or online, and we find we have more retail premises than we need.
I lived in St. Olaves road between 1968 and 1984, and passed this row of buildings on a daily basis. Certainly well into the seventies the building between Whiting’s and what became the Churchill Hotel (I think at this time the Churchill building belonged to the Environment Agency) was indeed a shop. It was a Fishmongers, I believe Cross’s. It had a very fifties tiled facade with I believe a central entrance that was shuttered when closed. I particularly remember passing at the end of trading when the shop assistant complete with blue and white striped apron would hose down the shop interior onto the pavement outside. There was also a typical lettered delivery cycle regularly parked outside. When the shop closed it relocated further down Clifton near to the Green.
Lovely to have this record of Bootham back then, before I remember it. I do remember Cross’s being further down near Clifton Green, where the betting shop is now. Their old sign is included in http://yorkstories.co.uk/little-lost-things-signage/