Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Beautiful old butchers sign & interior corner of Kimberley Gardens
Hey folks - shop refit corner of Kimberley Gardens reveals lovely original signage, and inside there are the original tiles with agricultural scenes. Do hope they're not destroyed. Even better if they're made a feature.
Tags for Forum Posts: ghost signs, old shop signs
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh
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Well done and thank you for taking these photos.
I've tried to find out a little about the shop.
Grand Parade was completed in 1899, but number 23 didn't get its first retail tenant until 1902 when it was joined with number 24 next door as part of the drapery store J. H. Proctor. The venture however only lasted a couple of years and by 1905 the premises was empty and seems to have stayed that way until 1911 when it was re-opened as Seeger & Co. Domestic Stores. This again only lasted a few years.
By 1913 the lease had been acquired by the Maypole Dairy Company, by that time the biggest retailer in the UK with over 800 shops. In this period dairies sold a range of products beyond milk and butter. Indeed Maypole were the first company to promote the use of margarine in place of butter, originally under the name of 'Butterine' and had a the world's biggest margarine factory in Southall producing the stuff.
Maypole Margarine Factory, Southall. (Edited from anoriginal image: From an article by T Farrell, "Cash Cow:
Maypole Dairy" on Let's Look again website).In a display of immense wealth, in 1913 the company chairman Charles Henry Watson acquired the huge Caen Wood Towers (now Athlone House) bordering Hampstead Heath. It was sold in 1919 as business conditions tightened for the company. Five years later, he and six other company directors sold their shares in Maypole to Home and Colonial. (H & C)
H & C already had a store on Grand Parade. So, it is probably little surprise that by 1937 they had closed the former Maypole shop and it was taken on by butcher G. W. Wheeler. By 1943 that business had also been sold and it was taken over by John Alfred Dennis, he whose shop sign has survived to the twenty first century - and we hope, beyond. (H & C, by the way, hadn't yet finished with Harringay. It was they who bought Harringay Arena under their new name Allied Foods and turned it into a a storage warehouse for a number of of years. Side note: Early in 1972, Allied was acquired by Cavenham Foods, formed six years previously by British entrepreneur James Goldsmith. Goldsmith and Cavenham were used as a basis for the thinly disguised Richard Devere and Cavendish Foods in TV series To the Manor Born).
John Dennis seems to have arrived in Harringay in 1932 at which point he took over Royston's Butchers at 397 Green Lanes (now the Turkish curtain shop next to KFC). By 1943 he'd added 23 Grand Parade to his stable. Then by 1955 he'd also added 40 Quernmore Road (just the other side of Harringay station in the premises that today is Hillside Cars) and by the early 1960s, 152 Blackstock Road (at the bend in the road just before Gillespie Road). In 1963 he stopped trading at 23 Grand Parade and by the end of the decade he'd also let go of 397 Green Lanes to focus on his other two premises.
My guess is that the shop interior in your photo is probably Maypole's. Firstly, Edwardian dairies were known for spending on lavish shop interiors and secondly it seems less likely that a sole trader butcher would be spending on an expensive shop refit in the late thirties.
Despte the hundreds of photos I have of early Green Lanes, I have nothing that shows 23 Grand Parade, although it did just make it into a photo taken by Woolies after their 1973 shop rebuild (in what is now Iceland). I've added that below along with some Maypole pictures I've found that are unrelated to Harringay but offer an idea of what the shop was probably like.
As far as i can make out there is no confirmed surviving interior of any Maypole shop. So, if this is indeed a part of a Maypole interior, it would be significant. Quite a few of the mosaic entrances survive. I'm not around to check. So, if anyone's passing by ...?
Maypole Dairy Hartlepool
Greenwich Maypole, 1914
Interior of Maypole showing the photograph owner's relative Ernie Maggs. Probably in Maypole Brentford. (Image: Peter Maggs)
Entrance to former Maypole Dairy shop, Edinburgh, Stephen C Dickson on Wikipedia
Bookshop at 23 Grand Parade in November 1973 (Woolwirths)
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Permalink Reply by kotkas
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Gorgeous signage, also noticed it post my run this morning. sadly to be obscured by some hideous tasteless neon jewellers sign. Sigh
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Permalink Reply by Don
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Fabulous signage. From Streetview it looks as though the fascia has been re-vamped at least twice before in its life as a jewellers, so if the butchers’ sign survived that then with luck it’ll do so again. If it’s just a refurb going on, my instinct is that the owners are more likely to cover up the tiles than go to the expense of ripping the interior out, but who knows? Slightly surprised to see the original sign specifies “beef & pork” butcher; I just about remember pork butchers as a high street speciality (nose-to-tail offerings from just the one animal) but would have assumed beef was standard for any butcher, so I wonder why Dennis chose to highlight it as well as piggies? Hope the wonderful tiles survive in any case.
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