Christine Waddington - A Shop on Every Corner, 16th September 2023

The conversation in full flow. Image with thanks to Stephen Waddington.

This event – part of the YoCo-facilitated York Central Heritage Forum – was a live experiment in how memory and imagination, past and future and continuity and change can become connected.

Christine in conversation with Helen. Image with thanks to Stephen Waddington.

Christine and her husband Duncan wrote a book. They did visit the archives. But primarily they treated it very much as a social process. They put up a poster up in their Post Office window. Afterall they’d only thought of getting a book together, an idea that crystalized as they shared a bottle of wine on holiday, because of all the stories they’d heard from their regulars, exchanging memories as they picked up their pensions or posted their parcels.

The poster went up and the stories kept coming. A theme emerged. As the railways expanded and the housing for railway workers was built and the area became a neighbourhood, shops appeared. Not just one or two shops but many, and selling anything you could want.

In the 1880s there was a dairy, a butcher, a grocer and soon after the second York branch of the Co-Op. By 1900s there was a tailor, two more butchers and another grocer.

The shops kept coming in the early part of 20th century. The co-op expanded. There were three general stores and one, Fish’s on Albany Street, complete with a parrot who shouted on arrival ‘he’s in the back!” There were four Fish and Chip shops. There were three boot and repair shops, the Leeman Road Cycle Store, a chemist, a bakers, two newsagents, and more than one confectionist and the dairy continued to thrive. People also sold things from their houses, you could knock on the door for apple pies, toffee or pies and peas. As Christine and Duncan put it: ‘The story of Leeman Road is really the story of shopkeeping all over the country. More and more shops opened during this period until there were around 40 in all’ (check page number).

It was from the 1960s that the story of the Leeman Road shops changed. The Clifton Bridge opened, connecting the neighbourhood in new ways. The impact of supermarkets started to be felt. Shops changed hands fast, then closed. By end of 1970s there were 16 shops remaining. By the time Christine and Duncan finished their book there were 10. Now there are 4.

 This local instance of a national story has great importance for our conversations about how the people who live in the areas around Leeman Road, Poppleton Road and Holgate Road can be fully, richly and positively connected to York Central as it develops. It connects the lived experiences of change to the changes that are to come, as the railway works and sidings that fuelled the jobs which built the neighborhoods on both sides of York Central become new neighborhoods on York Central.  In particular, it helps us think about the connection between economy and life.

During the conversation at the event the social nature of shops became clear. Children made up games and ran between them. A missing regular you could set you watch by was followed up, found collapsed on the floor and rushed to the hospital. Shops were hubs. They offered a home to local characters. You popped in for a laugh. You could live your life locally, whilst supporting the livelihoods of your neighbours. The neighbourhood was socially and economically entwinned.

Some at the A Shop on Every Corner event were there for the memories. Of what it was like to go to the Slipper Baths and share a soap with your sister. One memory prompting another. Of the floods. Or the old school. Or of how many there were living in a two-up two-down house. Others were there for the future, drawing out themes and spotting connections.

Sailor’s Mart sold anything and everything a sailor could want - Christine remember this as one of her favourite shops.

The orientations of past and future lit up different constellations of people in the room. Someone would speak of the past and a string of others would catch the drift and join it, carrying it further with care and nourishing it. Then someone might speak of the future and a different network across the room gathered. As the past and future came and went conversationally the transitions clunked at times, the join neither natural nor intuitive. When someone there to work precisely that connection (me, that is) sought to make a join sometimes it was too blunt, too clean really to sew together the frayed richness of the past, textured and muti-coloured with feeling and stories and the sharp brashness of the future, at once blanker and over-illuminated, glossy and not yet ours.

Yet this is where YoCo is and needs to be. We need to be working our new York Central co-owned neighbourhood out of the everyday of what matters to create a new neighbourhood as richly storied as Leeman Road was and is. One where there is a shop on many of the corners. A neighbourhood which sustains the livelihoods of those running local businesses – both on York Central and in Leeman Road, Poppleton Road and Holgate Road too. One based in the entwinned economics of a redistributive economic design, where commercial activity cross-subsidizes forever affordable homes.

What YoCo hopes to do might sound like a future that may not come. But the bones of it have already been here, before. What is new is that we need to reinvent it more self-consciously. We need to design it and organise the co-owned neighbourhood to provide mutual connection and reciprocal benefit to a greater extent than was needed in the early 20th century Leeman Rd.  

But this is how memory and imagination, past and future and continuity and change can help each other – they brought us together in a room and something gathering texture and greater depth started to emerge.

You can purchase A Shop On Every Corner: Memories of Leeman Road via Amazon.

Image with thanks to Stephen Waddington.