So today, I had a very interesting history lesson when out buying fabrics for a very exciting lampshade making course! The course is on Saturday at Homefront Interiors, which is a gorgeous new interior design shop in Margaret’s Buildings that I have fallen in love with! It’s only a few doors up from one of our most popular holiday let apartments and it sells the most exciting vintage & contemporary furniture, using beautiful and sustainable materials. Please do visit their website www.homefrontinteriors.co.uk or even better, go and visit them at number 10.

Margaret’s Buildings in itself is an extraordinary piece of history but we’ll keep that for another day.

Anyway! The history lesson was in fact in Green Street from the lovely gentleman who owns Fashion Fabrics there. He has been there for 48 years! Which made me think he must have one of the longest-running shops in Bath. But no, a few doors along is Bartlett and Sons the butchers who have been there even longer than he has and Harris’s the artists’ supplies shop that has been there for around the same amount of years

It made me think… these are the kind of shops you don’t see very often anymore so I asked the shopkeeper if this was the oldest part of Bath. He told me that the Fashion Fabrics building was built in 1624 and there used to be a right of way running alongside the shop for cows to walk from the medieval original city wall to the fields beyond. The street is called Green Street because it used to be the village green! It does make you think…

Many people come to Bath to see the Georgian city but the building up of Bath is a much longer and I think, more fascinating story. Many of our guests who stay at our holiday homes (and the many hotels in Bath) like to come to Bath to shop but we have pretty much forgotten when most people made their own clothes (business was absolutely booming for Fashion Fabrics until the mid-eighties) and before that when we bought each item from a different shop. Even in the very late seventies you could still only buy your clothes from department stores, which were still quite fuddy-duddy so it was often better to get a pattern and make your own. I remember the first shop to sell clothes that wasn’t a department store and we all used to go mad for it but even in the eighties I still made some of my clothes.

Which reminds me, when I first came to Bath, Homefront Interiors was a very busy wool shop!

I’ve come back to the office to book in more guests to our holiday homes and I keep imagining Green Street as the village green and then the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers all setting up shop before the big companies took over. Apparently when Fashion Fabrics opened up 48 years ago, there was a butcher, a baker, a book shop, an artist’s shop & before that a sweet shop, a tobacconist and a silversmiths. Oh, those were the days! And we continue to support our local independents in the vain hope that one day these days will return!