Atmospheric Photo of Finsbury Park Pawnbroker's Shop (and a bit of a story to go with it)

1. Lucombe's pawnbrokers shop at 201 Seven Sisters Road

I first published this photo 8 years ago. It's a very atmospheric image. Featuring a shop which was of a type that was both the saviour and the bain of the working class, it does more than hint at the shadow it cast on the residents of the Pooles Park area behind it.

The shop stood on the corner of what what then Palmerston Road and is now renamed Playford Road. It is one of the foreshortened rump roads created when Pooles Park was redeveloped in the 1960s. On the opposite corner was Finsbury Park Congregational Church.

2. Seven Sisters Road, c1905, looking east towards the Great Northern Line railway bridge. The Congregational Church was opened c. 1886 and replaced an iron church which had operation for the previous 20 years. You can see Lucombe's pawbrokers on the opposite corner. 

The pawn shop appears to have been run from the 1870s by William Creshull. In the census of 1881 Augustus Lucombe, a Spitalfields tie maker's son, was working in the shop as an assistant. By two years later, a year after he married his first wife Maria Lipscomb, he seems to have taken over the shop and was advertising for staff.

3. Wanted ad in Pawnbrokers' Gazette 21 April 1883.

Within another five years the couple had taken on a second shop further up the road, on the corner of Fonthill Road, which they ran as a jewellers.

Maria died in 1890 and Augustus married a second time. He and his new wife, Clara lived in Finsbury Park Road, almost opposite the entrance to Finsbury Park.

4. Augustus and Clara Lucombe (Image: Ancestry)

Augustus died in 1898 at which point Clara took over running the shops. Sadly five years later she too died. The shops stayed in the hand of Clara's executors till at least the 1930s and I believe beyond.

5. the Lucombe shop at 221 Seven Sisters Road, at the corner of Fonthill Road in 1938.

201 Seven Sisters Road seems to have been demolished along with 199 and replaced by what looks like a 1970s building. 221 is still standing but the shop front was completely replaced at some point.