Shopping habits

Inspired by Rob Hopkins' Transition Culture blog on shopping, what was Frome like in the 50's & 60's?

From the blog, on Totnes;

MA remembers the shops until the mid-60s as being very different from today. “Everyone seemed to buy everything in the town, they didn’t go anywhere to buy it”. The idea, which began to emerge in the late 1960s, that shopping meant driving to another town, would have been baffling in the 40s and 50s. It is interesting also to get a sense of the extent to which the town’s shops reflected its position at the heart of a rural community, much more than it does at the moment, and how it was more of a working rural town than at present. AV recalls the High Street of his childhood.

“All of the little back streets had some kinds of artisans or builders yards or something going on in them. You didn’t have to go very far out of the High Street before you were in light industrial premises. All of the top of town, like Harris’s ironmongers, they had their big ironmongery shop, but on the other side they had, where Greenfibres is now, an agricultural machinery shop. Can you believe it?! There was agricultural machinery sitting there which was for sale! They sold harrows and seed drills and things to go on the back of tractors! They had a little showroom of all that sort of stuff. Then they had the blacksmiths forge just round the back there”.