Nostalgia
Oswestry then and now Church Street
This busy scene of Church Street looking towards The Cross dates from the mid-1930s. The most noticeable change is the ‘completeness’ of the run of shops on the right-hand side of the street. The area which now houses the Nat West Bank was then two separate, very imposing premises which fronted the street. At various times until their demolition in - I think - the 1950s they housed a draper’s store, furniture shop and a confectioner. The Fox Inn dates to 1687 and originally bore a thatched roof. Its upper floor frontage used to span over the whole pavement until an incident in the 1870s, which involved a visitor to the town damaging his new silk hat on the projection. This led to the removal of the frontage back to the level it is today. A 1920s guide to Oswestry describes the incident as ‘the spoiling of one of the most precious relics of the olden times that we possess’. Staying on the right-hand side two of the businesses still survive today, Boots the Chemist (in much altered and rebuilt premises) and Oswestry Goldsmiths (formerly Northern Goldsmiths and, at the time of the picture, A. Lashmore, Jeweller).
Moving to the left-hand side of the street, C. Bristow (Ironmongers) was a long-established business (around 1912) which survived until recent times and next door to this was Woodall’s the stationers and newsagents who were also the publishers of the Oswestry Advertiser.
The Cross
This pre-WW1 view of The Cross indicates just how many food stores were in the town in years gone by. In this image there are four in evidence; Beckitts (far left), Melias, Dutton’s Sigarro Stores (in the Llwyd Mansion) and the Maypole Dairy Co. on the right had side. Within the Church Street and Leg Street area alone there were over 20 grocery and provision stores in those pre-supermarket days. The other shopping mainstay was footwear and there are three boot and shoe stores in view, Morton’s People’s Boot Mart, J.Herr (far side of the Llwyd Mansion) and Cash & Co. on the right. Three distinct modes of ‘goods carriers’ are also depicted including a hand-cart! The ‘pick-up’ carrying the milk churns would have been one of the first motorised vehicles in the town whilst the Great Western Railway horse drawn wagon was still the main delivery method back then, with goods arriving by rail at Oswestry Station and then distributed around the town by several of these GWR wagons. One other well-known name in evidence is Edward Thomas & Co, who had a furniture store at the rear of this property in English Walls. The signs for Pratt’s Spirit hark back to a time when petrol was sold in cans by stores such as this rather than from a pump. By historian David Owen 56 | Oswestry life