Britain’s first supermarket

12 January, 2024 Gibson Square 2 Comments

It is 12th January 1948, and you’re walking down a road in Manor Park when you pass a London Co-operative. You need some provisions so you pop into this newly opened shop. At first, you’re puzzled by the lack of service, but then you notice other shoppers just picking items off the shelves. You think you’ve just entered a time warp and it’s 2024 with shoplifters helping themselves.

It is Britain’s first self-service supermarket that came to Britain 76 years ago on this day when the London Co-operative Society opened a store in Manor Park.

You accept the proffered basket, peruse the aisles and see that baked beans are on offer – you’ve never seen them so cheap. But as you pick up a can and place it into your basket, you can’t shake the feeling that the shopkeeper is watching you. You needn’t worry helping yourself is the way shopping is destined from now on.

But hold on, weren’t we ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, according to a derogatory comment by a Frenchman? For shopping etiquette is ingrained in British society, you went in and chatted with the shopkeeper, while the shop assistant ran around dividing and measuring out the items on your list, it was hardly an economical use of your time. You didn’t handle the goods – you might be called a thief.

In America they had self-service since the 1930s, it didn’t come to Britain until after the Second World War (although the London Co-op ran a trial in 1942, hardly sensible at the tail end of the Blitz).

With the arrival of self-service and its lower operating costs prices fell. Many of the traditional shops that clung to the old ways soon found themselves out of business. Soon Premier Supermarket opened a self-service store in Streatham, Marks & Spencer followed that same year in Wood Green.

Today we are returning to Napoleon’s assertion, with customers shopping online and preferring to visit smaller, more personal in-town shops, the big supermarkets are finding out what it’s like to be on the wrong side of change.

Featured image: Shopping in supermarket by Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0 DEED).

Thinking allowed

North Street Lights

11 January, 2024 Gibson Square 2 Comments

North Street, a road running, well North, from Romford crosses Eastern Avenue at its northernmost end necessitating a set of traffic lights at this busy junction. So reviled is Sadiq Khan and his Ulez around here, an area which borders farm fields, the Bladerunners (vandals who destroy Khan’s cameras) removed the cameras only to break the traffic lights which has taken days to mend, with the consequence of gridlock around these parts.

Puppydog tails

Johnson’s London Dictionary: London Gin

10 January, 2024 Gibson Square 2 Comments

LONDON GIN (n.) Inexpensive alcohol-based tipples used to quell dissent much favoured William Hogarth’s satire.

Dr. Johnson’s London Dictionary for publick consumption in the twenty-first century avail yourself on Twitter @JohnsonsLondon

Thinking allowed

Obsolete technology

9 January, 2024 Gibson Square 1 Comment

I was out walking the other day and looking up, usually, I’m looking down to see what my dog is up to, I came across this piece of GPO ceramic history.

When I was young, the sight of this technology attached to a property’s fascia was an indication that the family was pretty comfortably off, for they could afford a telephone.

In those days after waiting months to have a phone line, you’d share it with a neighbour. Regularly when lifting the receiver you could hear a conversation by your ‘shared’ line user. Etiquette required you to immediately replace the handset on the receiver and not listen in.

Now wherever I go around this little outpost of north-east London men are up telegraph poles (why on earth do we call a tree trunk supporting telephone lines – a telegraph pole?) attaching wires and black boxes. It all looks very efficient, and BT has even subcontracted all this climbing malarkey.

Now to press this brave new world of telephony upon us we’re getting emails warning us oldies much of our 1960s technology won’t work, while ambitious young men knock on our doors in an attempt to lure us away from our current provider with deals ‘we can’t ignore’, and our daily paper forecasts calamity awaits our future ability to call for help should we need help.

But hang on a moment, haven’t we been here before? If memory serves, around the turn of the century all our pavements were dug up to lay conduit in anticipation for cable TV and the Internet. But here it is, the telegraph method of communicating is still being used for 21st-century communications, and the wooden pole is even named after a Victorian invention.

Couldn’t the owners of the plastic pipes under our pavements just lease the tube to whoever has a contract to supply a property, just as our electricity and gas are delivered by the company of our choice, and just remove those overhead cables? With climate change and the increased winds predicted BT might be forced to take the subterranean path.

London in Quotations

London in Quotations: Craig Taylor

Quote 8 January, 2024 Gibson Square 3 Comments

London is actually a beautiful place when the weather’s good; the mood is lighter and everybody’s smiling. But for the other 350 days a year, it’s miserable. You’re standing there waiting for the bus in the rain or you’re waiting for a train on a platform and it’s freezing. Always a persistent drizzle – or if it’s not drizzling, it’s overcast and cold.