Retail Therapy Those Were the Days

For more than 50 years, the BBC have captured the changing face of everyday life in Northern Ireland.

It all seems so innocent today,

but without these moments, something of who we are now would be lost for ever.

These are the archives and those were the days.

It's completely invaluable to look back at film

because they take us back to another time.

I quite enjoy looking back at those old films.

It reminds you of old times. We've all come a long way since then.

Looking back is always fascinating. I do think there's sometimes the opportunity to learn from it,

to see where we've gone, to see how we've moved forward and whether that's necessarily an improvement.

# The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by... #

For anyone serious about their shopping in 1950s and '60s Northern Ireland,

there was only one place to be - Belfast.

Purchase power permeated the city's grand apartment stores and ornate arcades.

But while the well-heeled frequented the bustling boutiques of Royal Avenue,

intrepid bargain hunters headed for nearby Smithfield Market.

It was a treat if you went into town to get as far as Smithfield.

If you put up with everything else about going around the shops,

you might get to Smithfield.

My father would have described it "a wee huckster of a place". It was not built for purpose.

My abiding memory is it was like a big cottage

with whitewashed walls and slates missing from the roof.

For more than 200 years, this enduring emporium exhibited an eclectic array of antiquities

and savvy shoppers of all ages, wages and aspirations descended to delight in its riches.

It was known in my childhood as "the Belfast umbrella".

And on a dirty, wet day,

everybody flocked into it, the poorest of the poor, the richest of the rich.

You would have seen the academics looking through the old books.

It had a different pace, I think, than a shopping street does.

A shopping street is always urging you on

and Smithfield was the kind of place that invited you to stop, to browse.

It also attracted the homeless people, the wee down-and-outs, the wee winos.

There were a lot of characters kicking about then

who had been shell-shocked in the recent world war.

They had peculiarities and that attracted us as kids.

Kids are cruel. You'd have slagged them and got a slap on the head by someone passing by.

And providing the soundtrack for the Smithfield faithful was one of Belfast's oldest record shops.

The legendary Premier Records was THE place

if you wanted to hear and buy discs with a distinctly local vibe.

The other vivid memory I have are the sounds of Smithfield

and that's one of them - walking down that central street

and blasting out would be The Clancy Brothers or some obscure folk group.

You'd have got somebody going in and asking for a rebel song

and sticking his chest out and looking around, defying anybody to say anything.

Then you'd get a wee man go up and say, "Give us the Sash," and that would be played.

Often it was just touch and go that a riot would break out.

# Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth... #

The joke shop was the one that drew me

because when you're 13 to 14, you always want to try out something on your friends

and items like itching powder were always very popular.

The shops and stalls of this colourful market bazaar concealed all types of buyable booty

from the curious and the strange to the sacred and the stolen.

Smithfield was notorious in the old days for being the place for stolen goods.

That only really fizzled out, I'd say, in the late '50s.

If anybody was to sell something, they had to give proof of identity and sign a receipt

which really put an end to the selling of stolen goods.

But, um... Yeah, you'd have bought your granny in Smithfield

if you wanted her back!

# Someone's sneakin' round the corner... #

There was all sorts of people there.

There were strong men, there were bare-fist fighters.

There was gamblers.

It was... It was a market in the proper sense in the ancient days.

# Now that Macky's back in town... #

And Maggie was back in town.

The renowned travelling singer from Cork, Margaret Barry, regularly drew the Smithfield crowds.

Captured here by BBC cameras in the 1970s,

Margaret is accompanied by a one-woman dancing and fiddling phenomenon.

# And in green Tyrone

# Sure the devil a town in Ireland

# But you'll find the Blarney Stone... #

APPLAUSE

It's not music that I remember hearing.

I have a funny feeling it's not music you could have heard anywhere else, except around Smithfield.

You must have kissed the Blarney Stone a few times.

Oh, an awful lot of times is right.

The only thing about it, the Blarney Stone in Cork is a very tricky place

because when you lean back and kiss this Blarney Stone,

if you had anything in your pocket, it'd all fall down.

THEY PLAY TRADITIONAL TUNE

Dancing fiddler, wow, that's...

You don't see many dancing fiddlers any more.

I can't think actually that you used to see that many of them then.

That was not new to Smithfield.

It was new to that generation of people,

but that went on

from the very early days of, um... of Smithfield.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Royal Avenue

and the social spectrum,

the Grand Central Hotel welcomed an altogether more cash-rich consumer.

Decades later, these opulent surroundings would literally give way

to the bright, new Castle Court Shopping Centre.

But until then, this was THE place

to seek five-star respite from an afternoon spending spree.

The Grand Central Hotel was in the '50s and '60s Belfast's premier hotel.

It was a great family sort of traditional hotel,

family-owned and a family atmosphere in the staff.

It was smack in the centre of Belfast.

It was grand beyond dreams, beyond imagination.

It rated along with the Shelbourne in Dublin, the Caledonian in Edinburgh and the Savoy in London.

We always remember the beautiful revolving doors

and the guys who would come out to carry in the rich people's... only rich people's stuff,

carrying their bags, all well-dressed with their peaked hats and that.

Every event that was important in Belfast in those days was held in the Grand Central.

The GC, as it became affectionately known,

was a sophisticated social hub

whose VIP guests included Winston Churchill and The Beatles.

And even the wine cellar was a cut above the norm.

I think there was something in the region of 568 wines on the list, you know?

In those days, when you're talking about wines, there were no New World wines.

These were all French and German.

They were selling in those days at £50 and £60,

which was four, five months' wages nearly for some people, you know?

City hotels, of all hotels, have a particular buzz about them

that are not common to other hotels in the country.

You had people in and out all the time and you had a buzz about it that was just extra-special.

But the future for this retreat for the affluent shopper

and its unique market next door was to be short-lived.

Dramatic events in 1974 were to cruelly rip the heart out of old Belfast

and leave Smithfield a smouldering ruin.

# ..got it made, it seemed the taste was not so sweet... #

I remember the fire that destroyed Smithfield.

And, you know, I remember feeling that something had gone from the city

when Smithfield went.

'The market was one of the best-known areas in Belfast.

'Most of the shops were old.

'It took 50 firemen over two hours to get the blaze under control.'

# Ch-ch-changes Turn and face the strain... #

'By morning, the stallholders assess the damage.

'Practically the whole market had been destroyed.'

An awful lot happened to change the face of Belfast in a very, very few years,

probably between 1972 and 1975.

Those were the years in which the city changed most.

# So the days float through my eyes

# But still the days seem the same... #

Back in 1971, a ring of steel swathed the city centre as this unrelenting decade took grip.

The Grand Central suffered financially

and loyal patrons were forced to witness this once proud hotel's final days.

You obviously don't come to the Grand Central every day for lunch?

No, it's my friend's birthday and we thought it's such a sad occasion, the last day,

that we'd come and celebrate it by having our lunch here.

How do you feel about the Grand Central closing?

It's an indication of all the things in Belfast closing down. It's sad.

I've come to the Grand Central for several weeks a year ever since the war finished.

How do you feel about it closing?

I feel very sad indeed. This must be a great loss to Belfast.

It's more like an institution closing than a hotel.

It was an end of an era.

In Dublin and other cities today, those fine hotels are still thriving.

There's nothing left in Belfast that will relate to anything before 1970.

It's a bit sad that there's nothing there of tradition.

As the 1980s dawned, ambitious plans were being drawn up

to revive the derelict site of the old Smithfield and Grand Central Hotel.

The modern vision of a shopping centre was about to become a reality

for Belfast's retail-starved shoppers.

Meanwhile, away from the big city,

the retail scene across Northern Ireland's towns and villages remained largely unchanged.

In Coleraine, the weekly market and a certain grocery store stayed central to the daily shop.

Moody's were a family firm which existed on the same site for about 75 years.

Raymond and Mervyn and Mrs Moody

ran the shop. It was an absolute treasure trove.

You would go into Moody's shop and it was just so quaint.

It was nearly like a general store you get in the Midwest of America.

There were all these lovely wee shelves with tea on them and they had flour...

You could buy bags of flour, but they also sold things loose.

# The bargain store is open, come inside... #

It was almost like a delicatessen before the word was even invented.

You could get anything and everything in Moody's.

If it wasn't on the shelves, one of the brothers disappeared into the back and out it came.

They used to slice cured bacon on the bacon slicer.

If you wanted cheese, it was sliced as well and there was no washing it in between.

Now if I use the bacon slicer for raw meat or even cooked meat, you have to take the whole thing apart

and fill this form to say you've taken it apart, you've sprayed it, sanitised it, and sign it off.

And, you know, still then, it was cheese, it was bacon, everything.

It didn't matter. It built up a resistance, I think!

# I do have some more... #

There was a personal service in this shop.

You just came in with your little list, got your order fulfilled

and it was delivered to your house by the man who owned the shop.

This was the same in probably over a dozen little grocer's shops in the town at that time.

The other one was McElderry's.

There's one bit in that footage where a guy comes up with a chain and throws it down on to the counter

and then somebody else is standing caressing a chainsaw.

And I'm thinking, "Hello! Where else would you get that?"

It was scary, but also fascinating.

# The bargain store is open, come inside... #

But in 1981,

a new shopping experience was about to hit Coleraine's commercial hub.

In scenes reminiscent of today's retail revolution,

consumers were abandoning the high street and embracing the out-of-town supermarket.

For me, the day that Crazy Prices arrived in Coleraine was a very, very sad day.

The first big supermarket in the town,

just on the edge of the main shopping street

with a dedicated car park.

People had got a wee bit lazy. The town had developed somewhat.

Now housing estates were being built on the edge of the town, so people came into town in their motor cars.

Rather than go to the grocer's shop, they went to the big shop.

# Can you feel it?

# Can you feel it? Can you feel it...? #

I mean, I'm sorry, but I hate supermarkets.

I go to them, but I just hate them, I hate the whole concept of them.

You go into Moody's and you get beautiful smells. A supermarket smells of disinfectant.

And I remember that Crazy Prices had a walk-in cold room

where you had to push back those slats and go in and get your milk.

Everybody's talking about this as the greatest thing on Earth.

I'm thinking, "The walk-in fridge - whoopty-doo!"

'This large supermarket lies just outside the traditional shopping and business centre of the town.

'It's a world away from the homely atmosphere of the family grocery.

'There can be no peace and quiet in here.

'You're bombarded on all sides by bright lights and advertisements,

'asking you to buy this, that and the other.

'It's no wonder the customers sometimes look perplexed.'

Half the time, you're being served in a supermarket by some surly 18-year-old with their head down.

Beep-beep... If you ask them anything, they're like, "I don't know," and that's it.

I think what's happened to Coleraine has happened to other towns. It's just generic now.

It's got the big shops, the big clothes shops where people are just wage slaves and they don't care.

They're working for big conglomerates that will make plenty of money anyway.

While there was no reversing these retail trends,

the traditional department store remained a high street mainstay.

And the January sales found frenetic customers worshipping at these cathedrals to consumerism.

For Belfast superstores, this was the annual gold rush.

# I would take the stars out of the sky for you

# Stop the rain from falling if you asked me to... #

The department stores were great. I loved them - Robinson & Cleaver's,

Anderson & McAuley's, the Bank Buildings, I really liked it.

They all had a different atmosphere.

There were all the beauty counters with all these heavily made-up women behind them

who were a perfumed world of their own, really.

And when you were kind of coming up early teens,

you just went and stood and watched and listened to them

and hoped some of that glamour might rub off on you.

# You to me are everything The sweetest song that I could sing... #

You had places like the big marble staircase in Robinson & Cleaver's that everybody always remembers.

You'd go halfway up there and just stand and think,

"Some day maybe I'll be behind the beauty counter here in Robinson & Cleaver's."

# ..just a taste of love to build my hopes upon... #

My main memory of Robinson & Cleaver's is going in the very ancient lift in there.

What happened was I was going in with my mum and dad.

My dad was always prone to doing these kind of jokey things.

When we were travelling up in the lift, there were two doors

and he opened the back doors for some reason and the lift stopped between floors.

I was absolutely terrified. I still can't go in lifts by myself.

# Oh, you to me are everything The sweetest song that I can sing... #

Most of us came from pretty... not very well-off backgrounds.

When your parents went to department stores like the Co, for example...

..it was to buy things on HP.

It wasn't to buy things straight off or produce credit cards

because nobody had credit cards.

It was to go in and look and see that thing that was 35 pounds, 19 and ninepence,

if they paid half a crown a week, you know, for the duration, really,

that television set could be in your living room.

It was about aspiring to glamour, I suppose,

and aspiring to own those kind of things

because for most of us it was outside the realm of what we could do.

-Do you think you get value for money here?

-You'd better ask my wife that!

-What about you, ladies? Do you think it's a good store?

-I think it's beautiful. Plenty of bargains.

-Have you found any yet?

-Yes, I've seen some nice curtain material.

-Did you buy it or just window-shop?

-Just looked at it.

There is something very nice about a department store and about those old department stores.

They weren't made up of a whole load of concessions of shops that are outside as well.

You went into Anderson & McAuley's

and it was just Anderson & McAuley's.

It's hard to believe now, but back in the 1970s and '80s,

seemingly innocuous day trips brought daily spot checks, body frisks and security controls.

But that didn't stop hardy shoppers from venturing beyond the metal gates

and immersing themselves in the retail melee.

There was the ring of steel around the centre of the town, so you had to open your handbag

and get searched, get frisked on the way through the gates,

just to get into Donegall Place or into Royal Avenue.

When you went into the shops, your handbag was looked in again.

I remember going to see friends in England and I did that there too and they thought I was nuts.

You'd walk into a shop on Oxford Street and you'd wait for somebody to come and look in your handbag.

They were all mortified by this, but it was just such a normal part of everyday life.

There was no late-night shopping. Once you got to five o'clock, everybody was out of there.

The centre of Belfast was completely deserted.

It was a very, very strange place.

At the time, it was...

"Normal" would be putting it too strongly. At the time, it was what we had got used to.

But when you look back on it, it was completely bizarre.

Against this embattled retail backdrop,

shiny, new, American-style shopping malls were springing up.

# He walked into my life

# And now he's taking over

# And it's beautiful

# Yes, it's beautiful... #

Now in places such as Newtownards and Newtownabbey,

car-loving suburbanites could find all their favourite high street names under one handy roof.

# And now we're beautiful... #

I remember Ards Shopping Centre in particular.

I think it must have been about the first of its kind.

It was what we imagined an American shopping mall would be like.

You drove up and there was a big car park. It was obviously the future.

We were all told very, very forcefully, "This is the future."

And so, "Oh..." We looked around.

# We are so beautiful... #

It was really quite new and exciting and different

and that whole concept of having a street that you could walk down

without getting soaked or blown away or whatever...

It had the shops on either side. It was a completely different shopping experience.

I can't remember whether there was so much controversy about the out-of-town shopping centres then

as there continues to be now.

At the time, we didn't maybe think about that and we didn't give so much thought as shoppers

to the effect that it would have on our town centres

and the fact that it would, in some cases, suck the life out of them.

As the MTV generation turned our '80s wardrobe an unsubtle shade of neon,

so too did a new wave of chain stores adopt the DayGlo look.

Northern Ireland's fledgling fashionistas weren't afraid to strut their stuff.

There's nothing about the '80s that I really want to have anything to do with.

Those haircuts, those collars,

the, uh... No.

I was quite young in the '80s, but I remember my puffball skirt, my ra-ra skirt. I was proud of those.

Northern Ireland does not really have a fashion scene

as larger cities in Britain have, like London. Awareness is minimal.

People over here don't give that much importance to it.

Northern Ireland has always been an incredibly conservative place

and fashion tends towards the radical and extreme, so those two things never go together.

I used to have a pair of red patent loafers,

which I wore kind of towards the end of the '80s

and people would actually shout at you out of cars

because you were wearing these red patent loafers.

"What about ye, girl?"

It's the craic and the banter as well.

If you see somebody wearing something weird, you have to make something of it. You can't just leave it.

And getting to grips with the latest designs was all in a day's work for Newtownabbey's Sandara Kelso.

Back in the '80s,

this stylish graduate and Entrepreneur of the Year created millinery masterpieces

for some of the biggest names of the day.

There was a lot of interest in hats, obviously.

Diana was starting to make her impact.

But they were still very much for the races or for weddings.

You wouldn't have seen very many people wandering about Belfast in a hat in a normal day.

# La-la-la-la-la She's got the look... #

Well, I made a hat for Margaret Thatcher.

She took a fancy to a black leather beret which I always thought was quite funny,

but nobody really picked up on it at that time,

so as she was leaving,

one of the organisers said, "Why don't you give it to her?

"It would be great for PR. There's lots of cameras here."

So I presented her with the hat and she said, "Well, you must invoice me."

I said, "No, I couldn't possibly invoice you."

"If you don't invoice me, you'll never make any money and I shan't take it."

So I sat down at my typewriter to type an invoice to Downing Street

and she sent me a personal cheque back.

This valuable lesson in business

and lots of hard graft kept this designer ahead of the game.

And in the tough business of artistic endeavour,

celebrity endorsements helped encourage her enterprising spirit.

I like to think my hats are innovative.

I try styles and shapes that others don't try.

If that leads the way, I'm happy to do that.

Northern Ireland is still a pretty macho, conservative place.

Starting a hat business here today would still be very difficult.

She could have gone on Dragons' Den.

Her ideas were good, her business sense was good.

These days, we look to creative industries as a way into the future.

Then people just thought it was a highway to nothing, I suppose, really.

Back in the '80s, Sandara's local shop window was still a world away from today's global marketplace.

Online advances would reinvent the retail trade.

But for small businesses like this, they would come that little bit too late.

Well, you know, you just think, "Internet, email,"

you know, all that ability to sell worldwide

would be a huge bonus and benefit to anyone starting up in business now.

# Once upon a time there was a tavern... #

This is the story of how our shopping habits have evolved from market stalls to computer screens

and shaped our retail future.

And thanks to a rich archive and the magic of film,

we can bring those bygone days back to life.

# Those were the days, my friend

# We thought they'd never end

# We'd sing and dance for ever and a day

# We'd live the life we choose

# We'd fight and never lose

# Those were the days

# Oh, yes, those were the days... #