On Smedley Lane in 1965, buying at the corner shop

I doubt that W. Kay realized that within a few decades of this picture being taken corner shops like this would have had their day.

Now I bet someone will comment that they have one just like it at the end of their road, but I rather think this will be the exception.

Once they were everywhere.  Mostly they sold a mix of food and cigarettes and some also sold alcohol.  And long before the phrase “open late” appeared over shop doors these places could be relied on to sell you a bottle of milk, a tin of beans and a couple of eggs hours after the supermarkets closed.

And that is the point as the supermarkets stayed open longer, offered a bewildering choice of food from across the globe and competed with each other to push prices down shops like this were pretty much doomed.

But once they were everywhere.  As late as the 1970s it was still possible to walk down Beech Road from the bus station and pass four before you hit the main line of shops, while on the green, on Crossland Road and on Ivygreen Road and the smaller roads off there were more.

This one taken by W. Kay in 1965 was on Smedley Lane.

I first saw it on that excellent facebook site, Kennet House and The Woodlands Estate.*

It is a perfect example of the type of shop most of us will have used.

Leaving aside the jars of sweets, tins of food and household cleaning materials the shop front is dominated by adverts for cigarettes, ice cream, nylons, and frozen food.

All these products had a long shelf life and were likely to have been bought in small quantities.

This was after all still a period when people shopped on a daily basis, were unlikely to have a freezer or perhaps even a fridge and were paid weekly.

So the very idea of stocking up for the full seven days ahead was a practice yet to have its day.

And that makes pictures like this more than just a warm nostalgic tale of past times but a vivid social comment.  The small corner shop survived because for most of us that was how you bought your food.

You bought the meat from the butcher, moved on to the greengrocer, and ended up at with a loaf of bread from the bakers and a few tins from the grocers.

And then if something had been missed one of the children was sent off to the corner shop and managed to lose the change from the money for the baked beans to buy a bar of chocolate or some chewing gum.

Usually the chewing gum came from one of those slot machines.  These could be found outside shops and on station platforms and the design hadn’t changed in half a century.

Unlike their modern equivalent these were simple affairs and lacked few moving parts.

The cover was just a painted box and without a glass panel you pretty much took a chance that when you put your money in the slot there would be chewing gum inside and the mechanism wouldn’t jam.

Such was shopping at a corner shop in the decades before the bright big supermarkets.

Picture; corner shop, Smedley Lane, W. Kay, 1965, m16929, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council