In the 1950's there was a newsagent and sweet shop on Bounds Green Road, just to the left of Queens Road and almost opposite Bounds Green School, I think it was called Bailey's. I used to go there on Saturday Night to collect the Football Paper for an elderly neighbour and buy him 2ozs of Fruit Bon Bons. He would give me one when I got back with the newspaper. Can anybody tell me if a shop still exists there. Cannot check myself as I now live in New Zealand.

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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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