A CENTURY of going shopping in Kew will be celebrated next week at the launch of the fourth edition of local historian David Blomfield's 'The Story of Kew'.

This will be accompanied by an exhibition entitled 'Going Shopping - a Century of Shopping in Kew'.

How many people in Kew today remember the arrival in the 1960s of ‘Bob’s Books’, one of the first of Kew’s booksellers? Bob’s windows famously featured books with ‘lurid pictures of half-dressed women’. The shop only lasted for a few months - it was seen off by a campaign led by the then vicar of St Luke’s.

How do we know this? It is thanks to two of Bob’s more conventional bookselling successors, Caroline and David Blomfield, who are mounting a special exhibition of shopping of Kew over the last 100 years. The display, with maps, press cuttings and photos, is to mark Caroline’s recent retirement from Kew Bookshop, which she started in 1989, and to introduce the new owners, Mark Brighton and Isla Dawes, to the people of Kew. It is also celebrates the publication of the fourth edition of David’s book The Story of Kew, now revised and updated.

Their exhibition shows how shops in Kew, as everywhere in the country, have changed and evolved over the century. Before the war, for instance, there were ten butchers’ shops in Kew; now there is one. Local dairymen then delivered by horse-dray. Bread was baked daily on the bakers’ premises.

Yet Kew’s shops today show that small, local shops still have a place, and those that survive have adapted or changed to meet 21st century demands.

The ‘Going Shopping - a Century of Shopping in Kew’ display will be at ‘The Printworks’, Kew, on Friday 20th June, 5.30-8pm and on Saturday 21st June, 11am-5.30pm, admission free. ‘The Printworks’ is just beyond Kew’s Scout Hut in Station Avenue.