The Twickenham Museum
Exhibitions : Shopping Streets

Shopping in Teddington
Shops centered around Broad Street

A shop interior in Teddington
The High Street, earlier known as Teddington Town Street, is the oldest part of Teddington. The original village straggled along this road from St Mary's Church to modern Waldegrave Road, then a narrow lane called Frys Lane. There was little building beyond this one street until the 18th century. At the time of the Enclosure in 1800 one of the tasks was to set out the public carriage roads. Broad Street, then an ancient gravel track known as Hampton Road, across Teddington Common was one of these roads set up as a 40 foot (12 metres) wide road. Another was the present Stanley Road, then known as the Twickenham Road, which was also an ancient gravel road over Teddington Common. The Causeway was constructed in the early 1860s to provide access to Kingston while the railway was being built.
James the butchers

In 1800 the High Street included many large houses as well as The Kings Head and The Royal Oak which are both still in business today. Today, approximately one quarter of the houses in the High Street that existed in 1800 have survived. At this time the road ended at a large pond near Elmfield House which still stands. The pond, however, was drained sometime after the railway arrived in 1863, when the road was extended. The bridge over the railway was built in the early 1860s. The shops and flats which were on the bridge until the 1980s were not built until about 1885. The arrival of the trams in 1903 necessitated the widening of the road and many of the houses lost their front gardens and their privacy. The larger houses then became vacant and were demolished. A few of the smaller older houses can still be seen behind the shops of the north side of the street. Parades of shops were built on the south side about the beginning of the 20th century.

There were no buildings in Broad Street at the time of the Enclosure in 1800. Building started shortly afterwards and by 1860 there were a number of houses on the south side of the street. A number of shops had arrived in Broad Street by the time of the 1871 census, although there were still private houses in the road. The parades of shops were built about the turn of the 20th century. By 1900 Broad Street had become the main shopping street. The street changed little between the two world wars and during this period trolley buses replaced trams. Since the war the mix of shops has changed considerably. The number of food shops declined from 21 (a third of the shops in Broad Street) to 3 in 2001. This is due to a number of factors including refrigeration and the Tesco's store which has grown over the years and led to the closure of many small food outlets. A number of charity shops (around 6 at present) occupy what might otherwise be empty shops.

A view of Broad Street

Stanley Road had been designated as a 40 foot (12 Metres) public carriage road in 1800. There were few houses until after 1860 when the Upper Manor Farm land between Waldegrave Road and Stanley Road, was sold for property development. The Stanley Road Junior School near the railway line opened in 1907. The road contains a number of shops and some light industry. In 1944 some of the shops at the Broad Street end of the road were destroyed by bombing and others had to be demolished. That area was not finally redeveloped until the 1980s.

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