Reasons for Designation
18a High Street, South Norwood is designated at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* special historic interest as a well-preserved example of a 1920s shop complete with sunburst transom lights and polished glass fascias, tiled walls with mirrored panels, original counters, glass globe lights, and original ceiling and floor coverings;
* survival of distinctive features of note related to the sale of sausages by the Kennedy family including signage and lettered display cabinets and shelves, in the distinctive house style that is readable across the chain;
* the rarity of survival, in a national context, of a small shop with its features intact.
Details
This list entry was subject to a Minor Enhancement on 5 March 2024 to add historic background
1005/0/10095
18A HIGH STREET, SOUTH NORWOOD
Kennedys Sausages
21-MAY-08
GV II
Shop, 1926, for Kennedys. Minor later alterations. The special interest resides in the ground floor shop front and interior only, and the rest of the building is of lesser interest.
SHOP FRONT: the two storey plus attic building has a bronze shop front of 1926 with grey granite stallriser, a complete set of transom lights of stained glass in an Art-Deco sunburst design and polished glass fascia which announces '18A KENNEDY 18A'; the fascia has a makers' mark reading 'Brilliant Signs Ltd London'. The recessed lobby, to the right of the display window, has a soffit with green tiles to dado and yellow tiles above and a black and white tiled floor. The double doors to the shop are original.
SHOP INTERIOR: largely unaltered since the 1920s. The walls are clad in coloured tiles, green up to the timber dado rail and primrose up to the picture rail and there are green tile- and wood-edged mirrored panels arranged around the shop. Above the primrose tiles, at frieze level, are plastic panels in wood surrounds, which also cover the ceiling. Four white glass globe lights hang by chains from the ceiling and light the marble-topped back counter and the main counter, both the originals and faced with green tiles. Affixed to the wall behind the back counter is a large wood cabinet with glass back, designed for the display of wares, with lettering in the centre of the entablature reading 'SAUSAGES' on a yellow background and in raised sections above this on a green background 'COOKED MEAT' and 'LOBSTER PASTE'. The floor is covered in red linoleum.
HISTORY: Some Roman finds have been found within the vicinity of South Norwood and during the Anglo-Saxon period the area was called North Wood. The Parish of Croydon is recorded as Great North Wood within the Domesday book of 1086, when much of the land belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury. By the mid-C18 much of the wood had been cleared to create heathland and agricultural land, and a small hamlet had appeared. Much of the land was then enclosed under the 1797 Act, in the early C19.
The Croydon Canal was constructed through the wider area between 1802 and 1806 and although it was closed in 1836, its alignment was used by the London & Croydon Railway Company. Norwood Junction station was built in 1859, with Station Road leading up to South Norwood High Street. This prompted the development of South Norwood with shops, Victorian villas and terraced housing.
The former Kennedys Sausages shop is one of the earliest branches to survive of a small chain of shops in operation in South London for nearly 140 years. Kennedys began trading from 140 Rye Lane, Peckham in the 1870s, though nothing remains of their premises there now, and the proprietor from the 1890s was a John Kennedy. The business appeared in trades directories as 'ham and beef dealers' but Kennedy also ran a fishmonger at 128 Rye Lane. In around 1899, an Andrew John Kennedy, opened a fishmongers at 297 New Cross Road which was joined in the succeeding years by a ham and tongue shop at 301 New Cross Road run by the same John Kennedy of Rye Lane. The trade in pork products was clearly prosperous, for in the intervening years John Kennedy had opened another ham and beef shop at 13 Dartmouth Park Road, Forest Hill, although this was short-lived and had closed by the 1920s. Despite this closure, it was the interwar period that saw the great expansion of the family firm as they moved into a third premises on Rye Lane (No 85) and opened at least a further seven ham and tongue shops across South London at 86 Peckham Road, 319 Railton Road, 10 Denmark Hill and 305 Walworth Road (c1923), 18a High Street South Norwood (1926), 64 Deptford High (c1929) and 27 Church Street, Croydon (1929). During this expansion, the business was passed on to the next generation and from 1923 an Alexander Kennedy had began to take over operations. Of the shops that survive today only that at 10 Denmark Hill has 'J Kennedy' on the fascia and by the late 1920s the vast majority of shops were listed in Alexander's name in trades directories, although most displayed just the family name on signage. The chain expanded further in the 1930s with shops at 137 High Street, Penge (1934), 161 High Street, Bromley (1935) and 11 High Street, Bromley (1936). One of the shops in the chain was established after World War II, that at 23 High Street, West Wickham (1962). The shops sold sausages for cooking at home, but also pies for consumption straight away. Like today, such readily-available and filling food was a staple of working people's diets in the 1920s and 1930s. Kennedys ceased trading in 2007.
Just as other shops like WH Smith and Boots were developing the notion of branding and in-house style in the early C20, so Kennedys deployed a consistent design in shops across the chain. The same materials and decoration were used in each building, including: shop fronts with polished glass signage, granite stallrisers and Art-Deco sunburst transom lights; and green and yellow tiled interiors with marble-topped counters, wood cabinets and mirrored panels. Most of the fascia signs used at Kennedy's were made with the Brilliant Process, whereby letters of V-section were impressed into copper sheets with steel dyes and then covered in glass. The shop fitters, whose mark is on some of the fascias, were Messrs A Walter Piggott & Co Ltd, based at 7 Phoenix Place in Clerkenwell. The firm ceased trading in 2007.
Chains of shops rose in prominence from the 1870s, by which time transportation, in particular the railway network, facilitated centralised warehousing and the supervision of widely-separated branches. The trend towards chains was prevalent in shops selling day-to-day purchases; in 1880, for example, only two grocers had more than twenty-five branches whilst in 1910 there were forty-four with such a large chain of shops. As a result of the importation of frozen meat from the 1880s, butchers also began to operate as multiple-branch businesses; there were over two thousand branch butcher shops by 1900. The inter-war period saw the greatest expansion of multiples; it was then that firms like Boots, WH Smith, Woolworth and Marks and Spencers consolidated their nationwide chains of shops. Yet smaller chains of shops in a particular city or area, like Kennedys in the suburbs of South London, were still able to grow and prosper; something which has proved more challenging, for independent shops too, in the period since WWII.
REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: 18a High Street, South Norwood is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* special historic interest as a well-preserved example of a 1920s shop complete with sunburst transom lights and polished glass fascias, tiled walls with mirrored panels, original counters, glass globe lights, and original ceiling and floor coverings;
* survival of distinctive features of note related to the sale of sausages by the Kennedy family including signage and lettered display cabinets and shelves, in the distinctive house style that is readable across the chain;
* the rarity of survival, in a national context, of a small shop with its features intact.
