Tasburgh History Society

SHOPS and POST OFFICES

It is now ten years since the Village Shop and Post Office closed and the property reverted to being just 27, Church Road, but 120 years ago the village’s 94 households supported not only a Village Stores and Post Office, at what is now Old Post Office Cottage, but also three other shops as well as four pubs.

The first post office however wasn’t at Old Post Office Cottage but at Wayside Cottage on Low Road, where in the 1860s Ann Cann was the postmistress and her husband was the outside messenger or postman. It was not until they retired in 1890 that the post office moved to the Flordon Road corner site where there was already a shop dating from the 1830s. When after 50 years Mr. Ellis retired as the postmaster in 1954 and closed the shop, the role was taken on by Philip Lammas who was running a grocery shop at Commerce House which had originally been started by his father at the turn of the century. It was only after Mr Lammas died in 1979 and his widow subsequently decided to close the business that the post office moved to Church Road.

The other shop in Lower Tasburgh was another grocery and general stores based at The Limes. It had been started in the 1860s by Mrs. Welch, the wife of the farmer there, as a grocer’s and draper’s shop, and it continued to operate under various ownerships into the 1950s. Perhaps the longest running shop however was on the main road just beyond where the Norwich bus shelter now stands. The earliest reference to it is in 1817, and being located next door to a blacksmith’s and close to the Bird in Hand (Countryman) public house, it was well placed to serve the passing trade. From the 1860s the shop was run as a grocers by Joshua Say and when he died in 1900 his widow Mary continued running the shop until her death in 1917 at the age of 86 . The 1939 Registration records a Mrs. Burgess as running a general stores there, and William Moore in his Memories of Tasburgh from the 1940s to the 1960s refers to it then being taken over by a Mrs. Brighton, followed by a Mr. Collins who was also a fruit and vegetable trader. The property was demolished prior to the development of Orchard Way in the 1960s.

Over the years a number of other shops have come and gone. As early as 1779 the transfer of a 30 acre farm included a butcher’s shop, but without any plan or name, its exact location is unknown. In the mid 1800s, Mr. Howlett at Cottage Farm was a butcher as well as a farmer, and a number of other farmers also described themselves as sheep or cattle dressers or a pork butcher. Even the publican at The Horse Shoes pub ran a butcher’s shop on the site, and a baker operated in Shearing’s Yard opposite Mill Barn, as did a travelling fishmonger, who took his deliveries off the train at Flordon station, and in 1852 there was a general shop adjoining Manor Farm Cottages on Saxlingham Lane. There was also a shop at Akela on Low Road which had to close at the end of the 1800s because the thatched roof was destroyed in a fire, and never reopened.

On Church Road the property, which by 1870 had become The Cherry Tree pub (now Birch Grove), was another butcher’s shop before becoming a grocer’s in 1851. Next door during WW2 there was also a small grocer’s shop in a building which has since been demolished to form the entrance to Woodlands Rise, and in the 1980s another village shop operated briefly on the other side of Birch Grove, before the post office opened at 27 Church Road.

Ben Goodfellow