This postcard photograph, taken by Frederick Pearse, was posted in 1904 and looks down Bridge Street from its crossing with the High Street. The imposing cast iron gas-lamp in the foreground once stood in front of the Guildhall but was replaced in 1887 by a new more elaborate lamp and water fountain celebrating Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.

The building at the corner of the High Street with its distinctive arched window framing is familiar enough. For older residents, it will forever be known as Burden’s Corner, after the family of that name who were trading there for many years. Although all one building, it straddles both Bridge street and High Street; No 1 High Street is actually the shop just out of the picture, where Burden’s had their fish shop. Later, from about 1923, the family took over the corner shop, which is No 2 Bridge Street, and this was run as a tobacconists and confectioners.

Burden’s corner was once Shipton’s Corner, named after Joey Shipton who once had the whole premises. He too ran a fish shop at No 1 High Street. Cyril Berry in his book Old Andover, records a talk given by Frank Beale to the Andover History Group in 1952 in which the speaker mentions Joey Shipton as the fishmonger and says that ‘his daughter [Annie] kept the sweet shop next door, and around the corner they also had a basket shop.’ Mr Shipton died in 1899 and his son Walter ran the fish shop for a while before it became Burden’s around 1905, while Annie Shipton, who had married Walter Sellicks in 1888, continued to run the adjacent basket shop in Bridge Street until at least 1907.

Harry William Burden, when he first arrived in Andover with a young family around 1900, both worked and lived in premises that became part of Mark’s and Spencer’s future site in the upper High Street. The family stayed there until 1923, when they moved to a new house at the bottom of Winchester Road, at which point the upper High Street shop was given up. The business at the High Street/Bridge Street corner was to continue through three generations of the Burden family.

Other buildings on the left side of the picture include the edge of ironmongers Thomas Lynn and Sons, the London and Counties bank - soon to add the name Westminster to its title and eventually becoming today’s NatWest - and Webb and Wilson’s the butchers, with carcases of meat hanging outside.

To the right, beyond Shipton’s, were Day and Co, corn and coal merchants who also had premises at Town Station Yard. Next door was a long-established chemists’ shop that saw many different proprietors. The building was new in 1824 when ‘druggist’ Thomas Langstaff established a pharmacy there and successive pharmacists include William Butler Madgwick, his son Rufus, Cyril Polgreen, A J Packer, and finally Withnall Wain in 1959. The latter was a Christchurch business and the Andover branch was managed by Mr and Mrs D G Kennedy until the 1990s. The building is now home to Photos2Print, a photographic business that includes the sale of home printers and ink cartridges - ostensibly a complete change, though by tradition chemists have frequently included photography and developing as part of their business model.