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Couture to Coffee Shops: A History of Shops in Cowes

Wednesday, 14 August 2024 06:57

The old Ruth’s of Cowes was a local institution

A special exhibition will run from Friday, August 16th to Sunday, August 18th at the Beckford Centre, Cowes, PO31 7SE.

Open 10am to 4pm each day. Entry is free but donations are welcome.

The display has been put together by Cowes Heritage and Community Group, which is based at the Beckford Centre and which looks after the archives of photos, cuttings and documents relating to the Cowes area.


Brown’s Stores, a leading grocery and provisions store more than a century ago. Today it is still feeding residents and visitors as the local Sainsbury’s store

Popping to the shops is something we all take for granted but over the years this everyday activity has changed such a lot. Who remembers the little corner shops? Cowes had so many. Most are now gone, with shop windows and doorways bricked up to make just another family home.

Cowes still has more than its share of iconic family businesses, many are household names even beyond the Island – Beken photographers, Benzie and Pascall Atkey to name a few.


The old Dewhurst butchers’ shop in Cowes High Street. With the old photography shop next door, nowadays it is a fashionable women’s clothing shop

But other businesses familiar in decades past have disappeared – for instance one high street shop was a greengrocer in the 1850s, a harness maker in the 1860s, a sailmaker in the 1870s, a bootmaker in the 1930s, Victory Cleaners and Dyers in the 1950s and 60s, Roger Smith Photographer in the 1970s, Herberts Bakery in the 1990s and Lloyds TSB Bank in the 2000s. It has now been a fashion shop for several years but do you know where in the High Street it is?

One of the biggest stores in town is Sainsbury, previously Somerfield Food Stores from 2004. Some Cowes folk remember it as the International Stores, from 1967. Its past includes watchmaker, chemist and baby shop, but the glory days must have been in Victorian times when as Brown’s Stores it held a royal warrant to Her Majesty the Queen and supplied yachts for “foreign voyages” with “provisions of  the highest quality”.

There will be a model of Brown’s Store on display at the Beckford Centre, along with the Royal Warrant.

You can see photos of these shops and many more at the Cowes Heritage and Community Group exhibition at the Beckford Centre, Cowes, from August 16-18 (10am to 4pm), along with old shop artefacts.

For more information or if you are interested in volunteering, email chcg386@gmail.com or see the website: chcg.org.uk.

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