Looking for clues to date a picture of Market Street

You do have to be a certain age to remember Market Street when two lines of traffic squeezed down the road and the endless waves of shoppers were forced onto just the pavements.

And it does not matter how many postcards in the collection I bring out, in all of them there is no getting away from how busy Market Street was and of course still is.

I don’t have a date for either the photograph or the postcard.  But judging from the fashions we are at the later end of the 19th century or the very beginning of the next.

And the key maybe Hope Brothers Ltd at 107a Market Street, “hosiers and out fitters.”  They were there by 1894, still operating in 1909 but had gone by 1911.

All of which gives us something of a time frame which we can only push back another decade or so because they have yet to start trading in 1886, but that would be too early.

As for the postcard it in turn must be after 1897 when the Government permitted correspondence to be written on the reverse of the card, but sadly it was never sent so there is no stamp or postmark with a date.

All of which makes me think we are early in the 20th century.

Still as ever there is a lot going on, with plenty of trams making their way in a line up to Piccadilly, lots of Horse drawn cabs, carriages and wagons lots of people in what looks like a spring or summer’s morning.

Picture; from the collection of Rita Bishop, courtesy of David Bishop