99-115 High Street

Archive Notes:

View of the shop at the bottom of Friday Lane, looking west along High Street.

The Chequers had closed by the time of the 1911 census when it was lived in by a Thomas Messenger, a retired jobbing gardener (Ancestry census pages 214 and 215). In the 1920s, 113 High Street had become a grocery and sweet shop. From 1926, it was run as a shop by Mrs Sally Keen (nee Gomm) selling groceries and sweets. By 1939, it was a shop run by Robert Green (Bob Green), then in the late 1950s the Bowen family until c. 1961. The memories of their daughter, Leslie Bowen, of her school days in the Bell Lane School and of Miss Wren and Miss Flood are found in record 536. Later Mary Blake and Percy Blake acquired it for development purposes at least 1965 (see record 1799). It then was converted to housing (Gomm family lived in one of these)- see record 1799 which shows the shop still trading as Blakes in 1965.

See record 298 for more detail.

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