Normandy Shops - Introduction


Normandy Shops

Shops on the Main Road Shops on Station Road, Flexford & Westwood Lane
Introduction

There are still many who look back to the shops of those days with great nostalgia, recalling how "you could buy almost anything", and indeed every conceivable goods and service has been offered somewhere at some time or another, today there are no general stores or Post Offices left in the village. What has changed is our non-dependence on the local shops for these and all our other requirements and it is that which has transformed the scene so completely. The majority of us, with our own transport today, also no longer rely on the delivery service which was once such a vital element provided by every shopkeeper and tradesman. Almost every old photograph of a shop shows a cart or van parked outside. The butcher at Preston House started with a horse and cart, which he replaced with a motor van about 1928. Others did their round by bike and the Corner Shop in Flexford even delivered by motorbike and sidecar. Tom Turner, who has ran the Westwood Lane Stores with his sister Ethel Turner for nearly thirty years, started his working life at the Corner Shop in the 1950s as an errand boy for Miss Paice was the last to run a delivery service in the village.

Enamel Advertising Sign
from the Willey Green Stores, about 1910
Another interesting activity of some of the very early shops was the production and sale of postcards of local scenes. In the days when few people owned cameras and photographs were rare, these postcards have proved an invaluable source of information on the changing appearance of Normandy and many are reproduced in our book "A Century of Normandy in Surrey". John Horne of Normandy Stores, James Pryor of Pinewoods Newsagents and both J W Bentley and Ralph J Harvey, of the original village shop, produced postcards in the first two decades of the 20th century. They were followed in the 1920s by William J Henry, also of the Normandy Stores, and P A Pepin of the Corner Shop. As recently as the early 1970s Tom Walton of the Normandy Post Office in Glaziers Lane issued a series of six postcards with local views, but so far we have only traced copies of four of them. Dorothy Applebee worked at the Normandy Post Office full time for 46 years then part-time for another 10. When she left school in 1939 she had an offer of a job at a shop in Guildford but her parents didn't like the idea of her going all that way every day.
Stoneware Beer Bottles used by
Purnell & Co. of Weyside, Guildford
from 1918 to the mid 1930s

Summary
Some types of establishment have disappeared completely, such as eat-in cafes and teashops like the Red Arrow and the Corner Shop in Flexford. Perhaps they have just been replaced by new phenomena which cater more closely for the hurried pace of our times such as Chinese takeaways, like that at Pinewoods which has been renamed in turn the Lotus House, the Jumbo, the Pearl River and now China Express. Other establishments like the Pinewoods Post Office, which closed in the mid 1990s, are lost from Normandy but not from the community at large, having been relocated a few hundred yards down the Guildford Road into the parish of Ash.
Map of locations of shops in Normandy

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Local shop advertisements from about 1970 Click on advert to see an enlargement
Your Guide to Decimal Money
(Decimal Currency Board 1970)

On 15 February 1971, known as Decimal Day, the United Kingdom decimalised its currency.
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Aldershot & District
Decimalisation
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British Coins and Banknotes
British Coins and Banknotes from 1839 to 1977
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Shops on the Main Road Shops on Station Road, Flexford & Westwood Lane
Downloads Map of locations of shops in Normandy (JPG format)
Local shop advertisements - Side 1 (Leaflet 1970) (GIF format)
Local shop advertisements - Side 2 (Leaflet 1970) (GIF format)

Normandy Shops The Main Road
Normandy Shops Station Road, Flexford & Westwood Lane
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