Window shopping
LET’S turn the clock back around 100 years and take a trip to the busy shopping centre of Stourbridge in 1910.
Stourbridge was then a thriving market town and a centre of industry, with leatherworks, ironworks, engineering firms and, of course, its famous glassworks. The town’s shopping district, centred on the High Street and Market Street, catered for everyone from those with a modest budget to the most illustrious clientele.
Window shopping is by no means a recent phenomenon and the Victorian and Edwardian shopkeepers certainly knew how to draw in the customers with attractive premises and displays of goods.
Guide
These pictures of shops are taken from the adverts that appeared in the 1910 edition of The Borough Guide to Stourbridge, Kinver, Hagley and Clent, number 444 in the series published by Edward J. Burrow of Cheltenham. It has been loaned to us by David Cookson of Amblecote.
The first shop we’ll visit is the grand furniture store of J.H. Stringer Ltd in Commercial Buildings in the High Street. A long established business, they were the complete housefitters, selling all furniture, carpets, linoleum, linens, blinds, bedsteads, mangles, toilet wares, prams and “invalid furniture”, as well as being removal contractors.
Our next photo is of John Davis’s cake shop at 49 High Street. Established in 1840, the business advertised “superior cakes, pastries, afternoons