Record
The broad windows of this house, between the church and the bridge, remind us that the building was a shop for much of its life – perhaps the most significant building in the history of Shoreham retailing. Part of its interior dates to the 1500s when it was owned by an Otford landowner called Romney, but its name appears to come from an early-1600s occupier called Riccord, or similar. It was a shop by early in the next century when William Pinnocke, a mercer, was in charge: he sold fabrics including “broadcloth… printed linen, printed and striped cotton”. He also sold groceries and hardware, and when he died in 1732 he was worth £505.
A few years later, the building was re-modelled into its present form: a brick on the outside is marked “1738”. Shopkeeper Elizabeth Beardsworth and her son William were in the premises, which came with workshops where goods for sale could be made. It seems that groceries plus items like soap and paint were still on offer. Beardsworths had been butchers elsewhere in Shoreham at one time, and four Beardsworth sisters later shared the ownership of Record. It became tenanted in the early 19th century and John Loveland was paying £26 a year for it in 1859. His son, Isaac, bought the shop for £675 in 1874 and marketed it as a veritable Shoreham Selfridges.
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Isaac Loveland may have installed the plate glass display windows and there were two entrances: on the left was a general store and grocery, on the right was haberdashery. Isaac’s advertisements proclaimed he was “in the business of a grocer, general draper, ironmonger, china and glass dealer, oil and colourman, furniture dealer, milliner outfitter, bookseller, stationer, tobacconist, boot and shoe dealer and drug and patent medicine dealer”. He also had a bakery behind the Post Office and a coal dealership next to the train station. But as competition mounted from a shop in the High Street – today’s Village Stores – Isaac seems to have overreached himself financially and he stepped away from the business in 1908.
The Moore and Kingsbury families were among those in charge of the shop until 1948, when the property became a café for a time. One customer recalled the groceries and medicines for sale in the 1920s; at Christmas a window was full of toys, and if you needed treacle you took your own jar for a fill-up.
Read more in Historical Society Publication No 23, “The Story of Record and Other Early Shops in Shoreham”