Visit the village shop which closed more than 25 years ago – but the window displays still change weekly
If you peep through a little window at the back of a row of cottages in Honing, near North Walsham, you might find yourself transported back to a time when every village had a shop piled high with tins of spam and cocoa, packets of beef suet and blancmange.
Almost every week the intriguing window display changes and just occasionally the door is propped open with an old milk churn and you are invited to step into the village shop.
Step inside the tiny one-room shop and see shelves, crammed with groceries - boxes of Sunlight soap, Imperial drinking straws, tins of Edward’s desiccated soup Huntley and Palmer biscuits, Horlicks tablets, Ajax scourer and Lloyds’ tobacco, packs of Lyon’s cakes and Smith’s crisps.
Pam Duncan might be behind the counter with husband Keith, in the shop her parents, Dick and Winnie Richens, ran from 1959 until 1997.
A few years after it closed Pam and Keith began turning it into a museum. Some of the exhibits are from the original shop, which served villagers for almost 200 years, others picked up from charity shops and car boot sales.
In any spaces between the shelves and cupboards piled high with groceries there are old metal and enamel advertisements, a photograph of Dick standing proudly outside his shop, a 1957 advertising calendar including pictures of the shop and village, a framed 1939 invoice from the days when the shop was a grocer and draper. The original 19th century weighing scales stand on the counter and a sturdy ladder still leads to the old storeroom above.
Pam and Keith live next door and at the bottom of their garden is the stable where Jack the shop delivery donkey lived in the 1920s. By Dick's day he had been replaced by a van but Pam and Keith have installed a full-size model donkey, to the delight of local children.
The museum is actually in the back of the original shop, which was once accessed from both the front and back lane, through a fine garden created by Dick who was once a gardener at Kew Gardens in London.
Pam said he had always dreamed of running a shop and when the Honing business was put up for sale in the 1950s the family moved back to Winnie’s home county (she grew up in neighbouring Ridlington.)
She was 14 when her parents bought the shop, and the houses either side of it. “It was in the front room of the house and we lived next door,” said Pam.
Dick took over as shopkeeper and Winnie did the accounts. They hoped Pam, their only child, might take it on when they retired but she did not want to swap her job creating window displays for the prestigious department store Bonds (now John Lewis) in Norwich, for the punishingly long hours and six-days a week commitment of running a village shop.
Alongside groceries, flowers, fruit and vegetables, the Honing shop sold newspapers, sweets, soft drinks and Lyon’s ice creams and was licensed as a tobacconist selling Ogden’s of Ipswich products.
In the 1960s it became a Mace store and a big modernisation in 1972 saw the counter removed and a self-service system installed.
“My father enjoyed running it. I can’t think why!” said Pam. “My mother used to go on holidays organised by Mace, but he was always too busy running the shop!”
However, she is a keen collector and after her parents died she began putting together the shop museum. Now retired herself she continues to use her expertise, changing the window display almost every week. “I have always been interested in museums and antiques,” said Pam. “I had one or two things that belonged to the shop and people in the village gave me things.
Pam and Keith open the shop in aid of charities and good causes, alongside village fundraising events such as the March daffodil day, and plan to open over the Coronation weekend in May.
“People are just amazed when they see it. They look for all the things they remember,” said Pam.
