I WROTE about Buckland’s a few months ago.

But this image sent to me by direct descendant Richard Alford has – to my knowledge – never appeared before. So I hope readers may forgive a return to the same subject.

In this picture, we have moved on 30 years from the one shown before. The occasion for the patriotic decorations being the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth that took place on May 12, 1937.

Two lamps still hang over the window displays of each set of premises, but the large elaborate gas lamps with ‘Buckland’ written on the shades are gone, to be replaced by what may be more modern electric lamps instead.

Electricity had at last come to Andover in 1926, after concerted opposition from the ruling gas company delayed matters for longer than in most other towns.

By 1937, Buckland’s was being run by the original proprietor’s son, Stafford Buckland, his father having died in 1928.

One wonders how the new broom may have swept clean?

The shop had originally been predominantly a drapery, but inevitably there would have been an increasing stock of ready-made clothing during the inter-war period, when goods could be supplied by large firms to shops such as Buckland’s at reasonable prices.

The window displays are full of the standard fare of an outfitters from that period and the overall look is not so much different from an ‘old-fashioned’ clothing shop today.

Stafford married Agnes Caroline Whitmarsh in 1902 and from that time had lived at 6 Osborne Road.

However, not long after this photograph was taken the couple, who had two daughters, moved to a newly-built house in Croye Close called Budeleigh.

Richard tells me that his mother, who was Stafford’s younger daughter Sylvia, went to live near London on her marriage, but returned to Croye Close for a few months when he was a youngster in order to escape war-time bombing.

There were some post-war visits to his grandparents, but his actual memories of the town are limited.

Buckland’s finally closed sometime after 1947.

By then Stafford was over 70 and he and his wife moved to Charing Heath in Kent to join their elder daughter who was teaching at Lenham.

In older age, with no shop to worry about, the couple enjoyed gardening and new surroundings. They died within months of each other in 1966.

The three Buckland shops, 55, 57 and 59 High Street, were separated from 1947 onwards, and were occupied by a tobacconist, a radio dealer and a dry cleaner respectively.

This photograph shows a tantalising half-view of the music shop Teague and King who were at 53 High Street between 1933 and 1951, when Sainsbury Fisher succeeded them.

Any picture of these premises is unknown to me, but it was clearly a double-fronted shop of traditional form.

Unfortunately, all these buildings were included in the first wave of demolitions when the shops behind the Guildhall and those at the southern end of the upper High Street were removed as part of town development, to be replaced by a concrete expanse of brutalism.

Fifty years on, it is difficult to imagine why anyone should once have thought that what stands there today was an architectural improvement.