Thursday  Market Bus Trips From Bradwall

A Memory of Sandbach.

In this picture one can see the town hall in the background and next to it now is Price City (2008), prior to that the Co-op. When I was a child this building used to be the Hungerford Cafe. I used to look forward to getting on the market bus at lunchtime with my mother and going to the Cafe for a glass of orange - this was then a real treat! The corn tradesmen used to stand outside the arches in front of the Town Hall to take orders for next week deliveries. It was the days when the Co-op van, the butcher's (Wakefield's), the bread man and the paraffin man, not to forget the Corona pop man, used to deliver to our homes and we as children could get the old threepence back on an empty bottle! There was Holland's shop where Burnell's is now. We had a Co-operative drapers and tailors in Bold Street with their offices upstairs where mum used to get her Co-op divvy! You could buy anything on the market then. Buses used to come from Hanley on Potters' Wakes and I remember people queuing up for the buses home and every other person seem to have four foam cushions tied up with string to take home to the Potteries. There was Melias and Hunter's on the High Street where one could buy all the groceries There was Dickinson & Lunts hardware on the High St. Woolworth's as well. Everyone I went to school with seemed to buy a lucky rabbit's foot from there,  they had metal tops so that when we wore them we had black marks on our skin! Ugh! Woolworth's was the place to shop, they had warm peanuts for sale that we used to love, sold in a bag that ended up full of grease - must not have been an healthy option. But then neither were Florrie's fish & chips. We remember buying some one night and cutting into the fish, it just oozed grease (I think it would have been lard in those days), but you could not fault her, she was a character in her own right!