Gone shopping
London shops RIP
The high street in every part of London has undergone massive changes in the last 25 years. Sushi is in; hardware is out. Coffee is everywhere but cotton and needles are like gold dust.
Where have all the London toyshops gone?
One commonplace feature that has all but died out is the toyshop. Where I grew up in Temple Fortune there were two rival establishments, Lucas Toys and Kendrick's.
Lucas Toys was modern, airy and white walled, selling generally more expensive toys and games. Kendrick's was old-fashioned, fusty, dusty and smelling of bicycle tyres and musty toy boxes. It was where I would religiously buy the latest toy cars from Dinky and Corgi. Lucas Toys had young bright-eyed sales staff whereas the staff in Kendrick's was venerable and avuncular. Both shops have long gone.
There was also a toy shop in Perrin's Walk in Hampstead and the rather good Toys, Toys, Toys in Swiss Cottage, where for years the proprietor was a bluff, affable northerner who shared my enthusiasm for die-cast toys. This has now closed down, as has the long established Harvey's in Camden Town. In an age of Game Boys and DVDs and the advent of Toys'r'Us these small shops could not survive falling sales and increased property costs and are now all but extinct.
London shops - a reader writes: granny aprons and acrylic cardigans - RIP Grouts
Dear london-rip.com, Carol here from sunny Palmers Green: Grouts of Green Lanes, N13... I really miss it! Grouts was the unlikely name for a haberdashers shop which stood for around 85 years at the corner of Green Lanes and Devonshire Road in Palmers Green. During that time, it had scarcely altered at all. It specialised in bits of ribbon, odd buttons, tea towels, zips and cotton reels in a fantastic choice of colours - not surprisingly it went out of business a couple of years ago, despite its vast range of granny aprons, vile acrylic cardigans and a disturbingly extensive collection of outsize bras and girdles - all of which seemed to be in a unpleasant pale yellowish shade.
All the shop fittings were original and it boasted an incredible arrangement of overhead wires, which could be used to send money from one side of the shop to the other. The shop closed down around 2003, but the cash telegraph system - as it was known - was sent to the Lowestoft Museum of Transport.
With haberdashery shops becoming rarer and rarer over recent years, I suppose it was inevitable that good old Grouts would go too. But it was a bit like an elderly relative who just keeps going on - most of us who live here never really believed it would die. It had been here so long, after all. Now, in its place, is a ghastly Italian furniture shop. Grouts, it's true to say, is sadly missed. RIP.
London shops: RIP Sonia Lyman - size doesn't matter
The Sonia Lyman experience was one to remember when it came to buying children's clothes, and one you were unlikely to escape if you were a Jewish girl growing up in north west London in the 60s and 70s. Mothercare it wasn't.
The shop, which was in Finchley Road opposite John Barnes (now Waitrose/Habitat), was staffed by its lively, eponymous founder and her shy husband. Sonia was tiny, with red hair, glasses and (crucial, this) a tape measure permanently around her neck.
The store made no concessions to décor, containing only jumbled rails of the sort of outfits kids wore in the 70s to weddings and barmitzvahs, and what looked like sheets on the floor. You, or your mum, would show a vague interest in something and before you knew it, you'd be whisked into the changing room and out again wearing said garment, while Sonia stuck pins into every fold and seam.
They'd take it in
The store's policy was to pay no attention to the trifling matter of size: if the dress was enormous - and they usually seemed to be - Sonia would take it in. If you had to squeeze into it, she'd let it out. It has to be said that she always made it fit in the end.
My personal favourite SL creation was a mixture of white blouse and psychedelically patterned velvet skirt which I wore as a bridesmaid in 1970. They don't make 'em like that any more.
Sonia Lyman is long gone and I'm not sure that its odd mixture of bespoke and ready to wear still exists - most shops won't even take up a hem for you now - but maybe I'm just mixing in the wrong retail circles...
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