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Permalink Reply by John Liffen on July 15, 2021 at 14:54

I too remember Bailey’s. In the 1950s my family lived in the house at the corner of Queens Road and Bounds Green Road. I must have spent many pennies, threepences and sixpences of my pocket money in Bailey’s on the products of the local sweet manufacturer, Barratt’s of Wood Green. The shop was located at 20 Bounds Green Road and was a conversion of the right-hand half of a semi-detached house with a bay window. In front was a paved open space with cinema posters on one of the side fences. Edgar Bailey, the proprietor, seemed to have a cigarette permanently attached to his lower lip, even while speaking. He was rather abrupt in his dealings with the local schoolchildren, probably with good reason. His wife was rather more friendly, though. We moved away from Bounds Green to Croydon in 1960 and I saw Bailey’s no more. On a return visit only two or three years later we discovered Bailey’s had closed and gone. It seemed incredible as the shop had seemed such an unchanging fixture in our lives. It felt, too, as if a chapter of my own childhood was over. The shop premises were  re-converted into a residential property with fenced-off front garden. Passing by now (see image) one could never imagine the busy newsagent’s and sweetshop it  had once been.

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