pound blocks with wooden slicers and beaters. The butter block had a slate bed to keep the butter cool and was also sprinkled with salt water from a bucket kept under the counter.

Another familiar sight and smell in grocery stores was the coffee grinder. The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans was a major attraction of visits to both grocers and to famous high-street coffee houses like Kardomah. Fresh coffee beans had to be ground to the required specification, flat wrapped with care and the package tied with twine. Tea, a far more popular drink than coffee in the inter-war years, was kept in huge metal bins behind the counter to be weighed individually for customers.
Another familiar sight and smell in grocery stores was the coffee grinder. The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans was a major attraction of visits to both grocers and to famous high-street coffee houses like Kardomah. Fresh coffee beans had to be ground to the required specification, flat wrapped with care and the package tied with twine. Tea, a far more popular drink than coffee in the inter-war years, was kept in huge metal bins behind the counter to be weighed individually for customers.
Such sights would have been commonplace in Yorkshire high streets of the first half of the twentieth century, from the local
"Co-op", to East Yorkshire grocers such as William Jackson and Sons, to the national chains of the time such as Liptons and Maypole Dairies. The latter was the creation of the late nineteenth century entrepreneur, George Jackson but in 1929 it became part of the Allied Suppliers Group, a merger of several long established grocers. The Maypole brand name has now disappeared along with many other famous high street names from the 1950s and 1960s. The 622 stores of Timothy Whites and Taylors, a chain of chemists, was acquired by Boots in 1968 while Martins Bank, the largest bank to have its headquarters outside of London, was swallowed up by Barclays in 1969.
Another victim of changing social trends was the famous Lyons Tea Shops. The first of these had opened in London's Piccadilly in 1894 and in the first half of the twentieth century Joseph Lyons and Company Limited was a major force on the British high street with over 200 teashops. Although Lyons experimented with many different types of cafeteria type restaurants in the 1950s they are perhaps most famous for their 1920s/1930s waitress-service cafes with smartly dressed nippies on hand. While Burtons, under its modern guise of Arcadia, remains a major force on the high street, the nature of its clothing business has changed to keep ahead of fashion trends. Burtons is best remembered for its made-to measure tailoring from a chain of over 600 high street shops by 1935.


The rise of Burtons was meteoric: Montague Burton (1885-1952), a émigré Russian Jew whose real name was Meshe David Osinsky, had started his tailoring business in Chesterfield in 1900.