Booze, Beans & Bhajis: The Story of the Corner Shop

What is it about the British and the cornershop? The corner shop has

always been there for us. A British institution.

There are almost more corner shops than there are corners. It was on

the frontline of what was happening in society from the 1940s to the

1990s. It saved our bacon during the Second

World War. It also became a rite of passage for

new immigrants, including my family. I am The daughter of shopkeepers and

for me the corner shop sits at the very heart of the community. It's

what mum and dad called the glory days and by that they meant a

buzzing trade and I remember it really well. The shop being

absolutely packed full of customers. I would sit on the shop counterand

see all walks of life come in through the front doors and you

would know everything about them, the paper they read, their favourite

box of cigarettes. Above all else, you would know all the gossip in the

town. This is a local shop for local

people, nothing for you here! This unsung hero has been at the centre

of ordinary lives for more than 70 years. Its death has been predicted

many times, but still it soldiers on. For the last decade it's been

said that the days of the corner shop are numbered. So just how has

it managed to survive? From the traditions of Open All

Hours to League of Gentlemen, everyone has their corner shop and a

story to go with it. That will be 97p, love. Thank you.

Oh, don't bother about the 3p, you can owe it to me. Oh, right.

As a journalist, I am interested in the role these small independent

shops seem to have played in helping to shape Britain into a modern

multicultural nation. Today, I am going back to our

Oldcorner shop, VP Superstores in Reading owned and run by my mum and

dad. It looks completely different. It's not how we had it, right? The

grocery shelves were here. Then cakes on that side. The till was

this side, wasn't it? No, the same side, here. But I remember, wasn't

it out this way? No, that way. Oh, OK. I remember us sitting here,

right? Yeah. For me and my sisters this was our

counter. The shop was our home. Our library, our play area.

What year did you buy the shop? 77. The year I was born you bought the

shop? You were four months old. 77, yeah. The corner shop was clearly in

my DNA. But little did I know that I was being born into a much bigger

history. You often hear that phrase we are a

nation of shopkeepers, a nation that's been built on entrepreneurs

and that wealth and drive of ambition, but I don't think I ever

realised any of that when I was a kid here in this corner shop. I

didn't realise that we were part of a much richer history, a history

that dates right back to the Victorian era.

In the 19th century, suburbs were created to house an increasing urban

population. But they needed a local food supply. And the Victorians came

up with an ingenious solution. Town planners created rows of houses and

terraces in which the house on the corner of a junction of roads was

designed specifically to be a shop. It would often have a large window,

a door on the corner, in order to attract the largest flow of traffic

and to serve that local community. # On the corner of the street.

Corner shops became the backbone of the 1940s urban community. But it

seems their success was a product of circumstances, we literally had no

choice. Dooring the Second World War when

most food is rationed people have to register with their local shop in

order to receive their food. This is a period where the local shop really

thrives, in part, as a result of rationing. Added to that, you have

really much more restricted movement, in part, because of petrol

rationing, but also because men are away at war, women are working and

so people are spending less time travelling to the centres of town,

there is less money available. So the local shop comes into its own at

this time. An Oldcorner shop has been preserved

at the Folk and Transport Museum in Northern Ireland. This is what it

would have looked like. Chris Wilson grew up in the Belfast of the 1940s.

This to me is the late 1940s, early 50s. All the sweets!

In those days we didn't worry about our teeth. During the war sweets

were on ration. He regularly helped out as anner and

boy in his corner shop of the Shankill road.

Because of course the war must have had a big impact on what the corner

shop was selling. Yes, it did have, that's true. There were coupons, you

had a ration book and you could only buy what the coupons allowed you to

buy, eggs were in ration, cheese, you had a cheese wire you lifted up

the handle and the wire came down and cut the cheese. Really sharp.

Sometimes you cut your finger. You didn't tell the customer there was

blood on the cheese, you just wrapped it up!

Health and safety didn't exist in those days, neither did the NHS. But

the corner shop stepped in to provide a myriad of cheap over the

countermedicines. I and all my friends in little houses were lined

up by our mothers on a Saturday morning and we were given either

liquid paraffin, milk of milk mag nesia or syrup of figures. On a

tablespoon line up the wee ones and you got it and a piece of orange

after. The corner shop was kind of a pharmacy and news agency and

Butchers. Yes, you could buy anything in a corner shop. Morning,

well, what do you want? A pound of pickled onions.

During the 1940s people shopped every day and the corner shop was

where you came to meet your neighbours, hear all the local news,

and, of course, the local gossip. I believe a bit of trouble yesterday.

There was. The corner shop was the social centre of two or three

streets. People talked about things. They talked about interesting

things, have you heard about him, he is off with so and so, have you

heard about her? Have you heard about so and so, she's lording it

over us because she's an artificial fur coat. All that sort of talk. All

this is happening as people would come in to a place like this and be

chatting away. It was a social gathering of the area. It was better

than the local BBC, it picked up all the news. Even well into the

post-war era we shopped into this very personal way.

This shop is a minute from the main shopping centre in Rotherham. People

rely on it from anything from sugar to a paintbrush. Customers pop in

for one or two items. The retail landscape in Britain is completely

different to what we know today. You would go into an independent shop

and one or two people would serve you, reaching goods from behind a

counterand packaging them up and serving you, it was a slow

encounter, a personal encounter. And three pounds of potatoes, please.

Few people have fridges, only 50% of people have fridges in 1969 so the

corner shop provides a local close by service to buy perishable goods.

God forbid if you forgot anything as the corner shop was closed on

Saturday at midday and didn't open again until Monday. Time you were

off. Right, see you. Good night. A shopping revolution was on the

horizon. The little corner shop was about to face its first big threat.

A transatlantic phenomenon has made itsz mark in British shops, the

self-service store. According to experts it's here to stay. Someone

once compared the self-service store with a lending library and you have

to buy the goods, that's the principle it works on. Choose for

yourself. There is no doubt self-service completely

revolutionised the way that we shop. Some people reported at the time

they felt less scrutinised, they weren't being judged. Now it was

often the case with people who were perhaps poorer or working-class.

Particularly if they haven't been able to afford many goods, they

would have felt more judged in the environment of the small local shop.

In the supermarket, you sort of wander freely. Because everything is

on show and easy to reach housewives are finding shopping easier, quicker

and more convenient. There are about 50 in 1950. By 1969 there is 3400.

It grows really quickly. Housewives hope that it will cut out queues.

The glamour of self-service made the corner shop seem small and outdated.

It's now engaged in a David and Goliath battle with the supermarket.

Many corner shop owners simply decided that they had had enough and

that it was time to sell up. How was the corner shop going to

survive? Fortunately help was at hand,

waiting in the wings were a new generation of proprietors, including

my parents. Mum came from Dehli in 1971 to marry dad. A great uncle

convinced mum she should take on a corner shop. Why did you want to

have a shop, you were never there, dad. You were always in the factory.

He said, you sit at home, you are not doing anything! Did you say I

have three kids to look after? She had to do something. OK, why you

don't do a small shop and when the customers comes the bell will ring

and you know the customer, go and serve. Serve the customer. Hold on,

you are at the back of the shop looking after me, four months old

and if the bell rings you will run and leave me! Charming!

So, why did so many Asians become shop keepers at this time? So, I

guess there is no inherent link between south Asians and running

shops. There is a set of circumstances that have historical

circumstances. A lot of the migration to Britain after World War

II comes because of a labour shortage in Britain. We see

obviously the northern Milltowns, huge recruitment from the

subcontinent for workers. That's partly because the white labour

class in the north doesn't want to do that night shift. There is a -

Asians are recruited to do that work. But this was the 1960s. If you

were an immigrant the chances of gaining promotion were slim. The

labour market is much more difficult for Asians than their white

counterparts. Facing discrimination in the labour market, one of the

only options was to work for yourselves, that's one of the

reasons Asians did go into running corner shops. The Asian corner shop

provided a wealth of exotic goods that couldn't be bought anywhere

else. But to be really successful depended on whether it could break

out of a specialist market and take on the Arkwrights of this world. We

have never met. Open All Hours tackled this transition

shopkeeper-to-shopkeeper. I have just the thing for you. Try this.

Three times a day after meals. The name is... 74p.

Don't don't get me wrong. We are colleagues. I am in the same line of

business. Me too, I am a Yorkshire shopkeeper.

As it happened, the very success of the supermarket revolution, which so

threatened the corner shop, would now come to its age... The rise of

the supermarket in the late 1960s and through to the 1970s is, in

part, because of increased amounts to cars on the roads, people can

travel further to their supermarkets, a cause working habits

are changing. Women work more, and doing one weekly shop makes life

much easier and because slowly people have refrigeration and are

able to shop less frequently. This meant we still needed a local place

to top up our shopping and buy our newspapers. Events in East Africa

were about to change the corner shop for ever...

On the 4th of August 1972, is Uganda dictator idiom Moeen ordered the

expulsion of the country's entire Asian population... They have kept

themselves apart, as a closed community and have refused to

integrate. He condemned the Asian minority, calling them

"Bloodsuckers". They made up only 1% of the population, but controlling

90% of the wealth. The reasons the Ugandan Asians Rhaney lot of the

trade and commerce was not inherent link but part of the system of

colonial garment. In Uganda, in the early colonial period, Africans were

not allowed to go into trade, banned by law, and Asians were not allowed

to land at that point. There was a racial division of labour through

colonial control, meaning the Ugandan Asians expelled in 1972 and

who came to Britain have experience in the trade. A ready-made nation of

shopkeepers was about to arrive on our doorstep. Among the first was

Abdul, and his family. His father was a successful shop owner, and he

was one of the first people in Uganda to own a Mercedes and he

employed over 200 workers. He was a close friend of idiom Moeen, he

never thought that he would be kicked out... Your father thought

that being a friend of him he would be protected and OK, I am a wealthy

businessman, but that did not matter... He told him himself, I

cannot control my generals. In the end, my father decided that we had

to get out. We only had seven days left before the deadline. They

abandoned everything and came to London with six children to support,

and only ?50 in their pockets. We were literally riches to rags,

overnight. We ended up in a refugee camp in Somerset. In a little

village. It was one of 15 rehousing camp set up by the government, in an

effort to show British culture and help assimilation, they came up with

some interesting entertainment. Good evening to you all, tonight we have

a different kind of entertainment from what we've had before... Mrs

Jones and her merrymakers from Newbury portray the kind of songs

that my grandfather and grandmother used to sing.

# Henry VIII I am, I am In Uganda our lifestyle was good.

But here we were, on the begging bowl. It was not easy drying clothes

in winter but in Uganda, she had servants doing everything. Cutting

onions, washing clothes. Overnight, their lives were more difficult than

ours. # I am Henry VIII I am #

. Abdullah and his family spent four months in the detention centre and

his father was determined to start again as a shopkeeper. My father was

one of those guys who said, you are not going on to the welfare system.

I know if it gets into your blood, you will never work. You will enjoy

it. He said one day, I'll start my own job, and he did. They got enough

money to rent a small shop in Bristol where rents were cheap. He

would work from half past seven in the morning until half past one at

night. He would Selma canned bread in the

morning, then at night, taxi drivers would want their chicken Palau or

biryani. There were no onion bhajis. What we ate in Africa was what he

could and people loved it. -- what he cooked. But not everybody

received such a warm welcome. During the early 1970s, 27,000 Asians came

to the UK, sparking a wave of protests from far right groups. We

have taken our petition to the Home Office. We are asking for some

common sense about this. We have many unemployed, we cannot

squeeze in any more. Leicester City Council took out an advert in the

Ugandan press, warning migrants not to come as they were full. Where

will you live? Ireland, or W 12, London. I will not go to Southall

Lester, other places, where there is an influx already of immigrants. Not

everybody was so well-informed... This actress is a familiar face

playing character Massoud in East Enders.

-- character. He arrived in Kenya at the age of just three. His family

moved to Coventry, but little did they know that they were setting up

shop next door to the National Front... When they first came over,

were they accepted? No, not at all. We were the first Asians in the

neighbourhood. And there was a lot of races, that was at the time when

the National Front were based in Coventry. -- a lot of racism. Shops

were targeted and I remember people throwing staff at the shop, trying

to smash it down. My mother was spat at, my dad was beaten up... Witty

enough, as you grow up, you go, that is just normal, right? -- strangely

enough. Asian shops are particular targets for attacks... I feel sorry

for the little shop man. They'd been targeted six times. The Asian

shopkeepers that we met were too scared to speak. It is a shame what

they do to them in there. It was hardly the start that Nitin and his

family believe they would have in Britain, far from the fairy tale.

There was no fairy tale, we had no money. Mum was wearing flip-flops in

winter, we were catching the bus to go to the cash and carry to fill up

the shop with stuff. I was four or five years old and

would be carrying boxes of crisps. It was through sheer hard work.

There is nothing romantic about it. Taking on a corner shop catapulted

immigrants like Nitin's family onto the front line of racism in 1970s

Britain. In the corner shop there was nowhere to hide, so why do they

do it? It is in our DNA, we were born to do this. The principle for

most Indians were that now we are free of the colonials, we will be

our own masters. We will not work for anyone else. It is a small,

emotional and political revolution for an Indian mentality, to push

that through line all the way through to becoming an entrepreneur

and being your own boss. And having your own shop? And having your own

business, whether a shop... Whatever it is, you are your own boss and the

way that my father would say in Gujarati, I do not want to be

bending my knees to anyone else... But how did we turn a profit when

others had failed before us? Well, we opened on Sunday. We also

imported our business model which included and costed free family

labour. -- uncosted. In our shopping Reading, nobody got out of doing a

shift and there was no pay in doing this work, other than eating as many

sweets as we could, in secret of course! But my parents remember

things a bit differently... I did a lot in this shop, stacking the

shelves... No, the girls didn't. In this shop we stacked all of the

shelves! Sometimes... But we would do pedigree Charms... Toilet rolls,

cigarettes... Silk cut, Lambert and Butler... Do you not remember that?

So, that was how my childhood was spent in my parent's Cornershop. In

the next part I pick up the story from the 1980s and a new generation

of corner shop owners. We have some great weather out there

today, certainly good enough to go about for a nice stroll in the crisp

sunshine, especially if you