Shopping

Even shopping, you did not have to go up town, Great Junction St. ,Bangor Rd had the Co-op department store, bakery, grocery, butchers, Shoe shops Timpson, Keirs, Easyfit, Saxone & Cable, Tailors, Burtons, Tailorfit, Hipps, Fifty shilling, Thomsons gents outfitters, now a sport shop, Victual Dealers, Buttercup Dairies, Ards record and music store, Shillingworths for work clothes, an assortment of grocer shops, furniture shops, Iron Mongers, Jewellers, Chemists, Fishmongers, Electrical  goods, Bakers Butchers, Pawn shops Nisbets on the corner of Bowling Green St. and Junction St., they sold cheap, on site manufactured soap and soap powders etc. Gallo’s chip shop corner of Bangor Rd and Junction St., later to become Facioni,s (remember the old chip shops, with their coal burning fires to heat the pans)

In the Kirkgate, the main Shopping centre with Jeffrey’s department store in Tollbooth Wynd Grants electrical store, or Duke St. and Leith Walk.... We had it all ... very changed days. Great Junction Street is a very sad shadow of its-self and the Kirkgate decimated in the sixties, replacing the old vennels and lanes at both ends, with housing tower blocks totally devoid of architectural merit. But still standing in-between in silent protest, is the historical Trinity House and the ancient South Leith church and at the bottom end, St. Mary’s Star of the Sea RC church

At Leith St, the area just below the walkway bridge, there was a photographer named Jeromes, where for a few shillings you could get a studio picture taken and collect on the same day. Very popular with the youths of the day.