At the top of Cambridge street at Gurner street are a couple of traditionally designed corner stores. Nowadays they sell soft furnishings but back in the day they sold all manner of staples. No. 36 Gurner (now trading as Form and Colour) for most of its time was a grocer's store. The above sketch (taken from Unk White's Paddington sketchbook of 1971) shows the shop as it would've appeared in back in the day.
This was the shop of the grocer and merchant Mr A. O. Morcombe. It was known as 'The Oldest Established Grocery Store in the District'. According to the accompanying text by Patricia Thompson, "Mr Morcombe and his assistants wore long white aprons and straw boaters. There were no ready-packaged goods. Everything was weighed out on old-fashioned scales. There was loaf sugar, lump sugar, demerara sugar, and delicious halves of crystallized lemons and oranges with a fragrant deposit of citron scented candy in their hearts. There was butter in round flat pats, hand-stamped by the dairy which made it, and spices and condiments from mysteriously labelled tins, scrupulously weighed out and wrapped up in white paper spills. There were sacks of flour and casks of herrings, and the tea and coffee came from afar." Sounds like this shop would do pretty well if it was still there.
Ms Thompson continues, "Mr. Morcombe has plenty of room downstairs and a large apartment upstairs for his family, and there was a nice little corner balcony where they could get a breath of fresh air and admire the harbour view. Two horse-drawn carts delivered to customers and for many years this was a thriving little business. At length Mr. Morcombe retired from the Paddington scene, and in the time to come the shop, like all the others, went downhill, became shabby and sad."
At the time of publishing in the 1970s the building had been bought, restored ("discreetly retouched past elegances") and turned into a Spanish restaurant. Anyone for tapas?
No comments:
Post a Comment