The changing face of Sea Mills Square

Although locals have always known the small high street in the centre of their suburb as Sea Mills Square, the street name doesn’t appear on any map. In fact, it isn’t even square.

It looks kind of like a loaf so, perhaps it’s appropriate that the latest addition to the Square is a bakery and sweet shop.

Tony Nightingale has owned the shop for 12 years. He previously ran it as a hardware shop, one of a small chain with sister shops in Shirehampton and Clifton. Like many businesses facing the cost-of-living crisis, he has had to adapt. The hardware business has now partnered up with a discount store in Shirehampton.

For the shop in Sea Mills, he decided to try something completely new and repurposed it as Nightingale’s bakery and sweet shop which opened earlier this year.

Tony Nightingale’s bakery and sweet shop is now open for business – photo: Mary Milton

There were once 12 shops around Sea Mills Square, an area of green space bisected by Shirehampton Road.

Sea Mills as it exists today was designed as part of an early 20th century plan to build a garden suburb with quality housing and green space, virtually self-contained with its own shops and amenities. Sea Mills and inter-war suburbs like it were the first 15-minute neighbourhoods.

The shops were constructed with an attached house for the shopkeeper and their family. They all originally had spiral staircases leading from the shop to a stockroom above.

Nightingale’s bakery and sweet shop had previously existed as a hardware store for almost 100 years. In 1928, when shopping first started on the Square, it was initially run by Robert Houghton, an ironmonger.

Indeed, Tony’s recent renovations revealed a sign from a previous incarnation – Sea Mills Hardware – owned by a Mr and Mrs Quinn, possibly in the 1990s.

During renovations an old sign, which had not been seen for many years, was revealed – photo; Mary Milton

The new sweet shop means seven shops remain on the Square today, plus the Cafe on the Square which trades from a converted 1950s toilet block in the centre.

Next door to Nightingale’s is Collister Beauty, a shop which has the distinction of having been women owned and run for almost all of its life.

Many locals remember it as a wool shop. 30 years before that it was a draper’s shop run by Elsie Welch.

Current owner, Caroline Collis, also owns the hairdressers opposite. An adjoining nail bar run by a different owner makes this part of the Square a kind of ‘beauty corner’.

Elsie Welch stands in the doorway of her drapers shop c.1950 – photo: Richard Welch

Nightingale’s is not the first sweet shop there has been on the Square. Betty and Barbara Wood lived beside Wood’s Post Office and General Store, which was run by their parents, from 1934 until well into the 1960s. One of the perks was access to sweets.

“Mum was strict about the sweets and chocolate,” says Betty,  “of course, as youngsters do, I managed to find a way around this sweet restriction. Bottles full of sweets were placed on the stairs waiting to be carried up to the stock rooms. Paper was in short supply during the war, so the paper seals under the bottle lids were left off. My little fingers became skilled at quietly removing the lids.”

Barbara and Betty outside their parents’ shop in the 1930s – photo: Barbara Stagles and Betty Coleman.

Wood’s was on the opposite side of Shirehampton Road from Tony’s new sweet shop.

Beside Wood’s was Bowell’s barbers.

Speak to any older person in Sea Mills, particularly the men, and they will smile when they tell you about Bowell – a nice and generous man by all accounts but once you sat in his chair you would only ever get  a short back and sides.

Wood’s and Bowell’s have been recently knocked together to form a larger, more sustainable, convenience store with an integrated Post Office. This means the Post Office remains in pretty much the same place it has been for almost 100 years.

A Chinese takeaway now trades in a shop which served fish and chips to the first residents of the suburb. People used to queue around the corner for fish and chips every Friday night.

As well as the chippy, a butcher, dairy, cobbler, chemist and a greengrocer called Searchfield and Daughters are among the businesses that have been lost to the 20th century.

Almost 100 years on from the opening of these shops, local businesses are on the agenda again and 15-minute neighbourhood are a hot topic. The survival of so many local businesses here is encouraging. Perhaps the old vision of the suburb planners still survives?

Mary Milton is reporting on Sea Mills as part of Bristol24/7’s community reporter scheme, a project which aims to tell stories from areas of Bristol traditionally under-served by the mainstream media

Main photo: Mary Milton

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