Were you a teenager in the late 1940s?

If you were, this latest addition to the Memories of Lyme will surely bring back many memories of Milk Bars and the giddy freedom of being able to go on family holidays after the constraints of the war years.

If the 1940s are way before your time, you will probably find Brian Wood's memories of working as a teenager in the Pound Dairy Cafe (15 Broad Street Lyme Regis, now The Old Forge Fossil Shop) to be an interesting glimpse into life then.

If you enjoy Brian's reminiscenes, you may want to listen to this recording by Ken Gollop recounting his own experience of working at the same time in Lyme as a young teenager, available on here on YouTube.

Happy Browsing!

A brilliant resource of both social and economic history, here is a wonderful collection of over a thousand advertisements featuring Broad Street businesses, mainly dating from throughout the 20th Century, although a few are earlier.

Despite its appearance, this one dates from only 1996.

Note that the exact location and the date of each advert's appearance is given in the filename of each picture, so do keep an eye on whereever your photo viewer displays the titles.

"By far the most valuable gift in historical terms "....

is how John Fowles in his Annual Report of 1985 describes the John Drayton's maps of 1824, donated by Mr H. J. Sowerby, of Roper and Roper's, Broad Street." It consists of a bound volume of sixteen 9" x 16" maps drawn on linen in 1824 by John Drayton, a prominent Regency and early Victorian merchant of Lyme. The maps are of all the ancient Borough freehold property in the town, and are accompanied by very detailed and complex valuations. They are also far more accurrate than any other survived plans of the period, and I make no excuse for devoting most of my space here to discussing them. We shall never be able to walk round the Lyme of 1824; but the large scale, accuracy and detail of Mr Sowerby's gift offer the nearest appproach to that impossible experience. In 1824 most of the Borough property here was leased by a method already old-fashioned: that of copyhold or lifehold, whereby a property was held for the duration of three lives (which could be re-newed) against often absurdly uneconomic annual rents. The free-holder (or Borough) had to depend on the fines (lump sums) and other old manorial taxes that could be charged the life-holders when they entered possession. True values fluctuated hugely according to the age and circumstances of the lifeholders. The ancient Borough was hopelessly inefficient, in other words; an accountant's nightmare. Why did Drayton carry out what I propose to call his Survey? It seems clear it was to try to establish a freehold value for the whole, quite simply because that was also a mortgage value- in plain English, his job was to estimate what the Borough could borrow on the town. We know that it desperately needed to do this at the time, because of the damage caused by the Great Storm in November 1824. The Borough had to raise £3,000 towards repairs……"

” Refer to ‘Annual Report 1985, Lyme Regis Museum’, in this website’s archive, for John Fowles’ full description of the survey.