Marks & Spencer's - the original penny bazaar by Simone Panayi with Lesley Gould
The Barking Heritage Project has been celebrating the stories behind the stores and old buildings of East Street and the surrounding area. Barking town centre has changed a great deal since commerce first developed around its Saxon Abbey. Various shops have come and gone, and we want to share the tales they left behind.
Continuing the theme of penny stores, the first one in Barking was probably, ‘The London Penny Bazaar’ on The Broadway. It can be seen in an old post card from the borough’s archives - this sepia photograph was taken before World War I, as it was purchased by Marks & Spencer Ltd in 1914. The M&S company archive has photographic evidence of their first store in Barking, and you can see from the shop’s design that it is the same store, next to the old Congregational Church opposite the original Tudor Market Hall and Leet House (demolished in 1931).
Marks & Spencer originated in northern England thirty years earlier, when Michael Marks established his stall in Kirkgate Market, Leeds, in 1884. The most popular items included household essentials such as, ‘nails, screws, pins, soap, wooden spoons, wool, thread and small toys, anything of good quality which could be bought cheaply and sold quickly’… , all sold under the banner, ‘Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’.
Like Meshe Osinsky, aka Montague Burton ('tailor of taste'), Marks was a Jewish refugee, fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire (now Belarus). He also started out as ‘door to door salesman’, peddling his wares, like, 'Moses the Tally Man', as recalled in Joan Luxford’s memories of her Barking childhood, in the twenties and thirties.
We could take a moment to imagine a time when Barking was resonant with hawkers, calling out, to advertise their goods… In London these wandering sellers were known as ‘costers’, from the old word, ‘costermonger’ – sellers of apples (or other fruits and vegetables) – the ‘costard’ being a large variety of apple, popular from the fourteenth century. It strikes me that the children’s game, ‘Oranges and Lemons’ mimics the costers’ calls, maybe ‘apples and pears’ was another… The only cries I heard growing up locally were, ‘rag and bone’, from collectors of unwanted items, as opposed to sellers, but this was probably the last, of a very long tradition, to be heard on our streets…
Local hawkers, according to local commentator Frogley, lived in Back Lane - designated a slum area it was demolished along with the nearby Tudor Market Hall and the Axe Street slums in the thirties. The end of an era.
Meanwhile the town centre and particularly East Street benefited from many new and distinguished buildings in the early twentieth century: the United Westminster Charities block (1-11) and after the road widening of 1927 the Woolworths block. In 1931 the art deco Burton’s building and in 1935 Marks and Spencer's Ltd moved around the corner from Broadway to 34 East Street (now Iceland). Like Burtons it was a prominent corner building, also probably designed by an in-house architect, such as Robert Lutyens (son of Sir Edwin). There is a great photograph of the new building next to the Capitol Cinema – when it was showing, ‘The Shopworn Angel’ (1938, starring Margaret Sullivan and James Stewart) a film title which makes us think of those stocking our groceries in the very busy supermarkets during the Corona Virus outbreak.
Michael Marks acquired a partner in 1894, Yorkshireman Thomas Spencer, and together they opened their first store in Manchester. By the 1930s Marks & Spencer had moved far beyond penny purchases and ventured into new essentials such as underwear - one of the ranges they have since become most famous for. It was during the depression era that they focused on two key departments - food and clothing!
The Capitol Cinema closed its doors in the 1960s and in the seventies M&S purchased that site and built a redbrick extension to their store (now Poundland). It was a sad day for many local residents when, in 1990, M&S departed from its enlarged store on East Street. Those in search of quality bras and other M&S essentials in 2020 can travel to Ilford or Stratford, and many Barking folk have not given up hope that the store will return to Barking once again, perhaps in a new guise, following the latest town centre developments.
The NLHF town heritage project hopes to demarcate lost stores, such as M&S, with mosaics and other artworks of their original logos in the pavements outside their old residences. If you would like to feedback on this idea or join our heritage volunteers you are in the right place and you can also find us on Facebook!
With thanks to LBBD and The M&S Company Archive…