Kettering, High Street c.1955

Photo ref: K13048

More about this scene

The National Westminster Bank (extreme right) is next door to a seed merchant, still an important trader in a country town before seeds were brightly packaged and sold by garden centres. The Countryside Library was next door - genteel libraries charged borrowers. Boots the Chemists' library (behind us, at the corner of Market Street) was upstairs, approached by a wooden staircase. In time their clientele would realise that there was no stigma in borrowing books from a public library, and that the pages were germ-free and not always sticky. Two men's outfitters existed side by side; Dunn & Co were part of a national chain selling 'gentlemanly' clothes: tweed jackets, caps and hats and sturdy gloves which fastened at the wrist with buttons incised with 'Dunns'. The arched Venetian windows of a building of 1880 are still fairly staid, but in 1983 a ritzy V-shaped window would replace the flat front so the customers could see almost all round the display of Foster Bros.