Dents Corner, Devon Road, Stowupland
By 2021 Dent’s Corner remains merely as a name on a bus route . This photo and more details can be found in ‘Serving Through the Years’ by Cowling and Williams. To the left of the photo is Little China, a Chinese takeaway which serves as a reminder of this 1960’s and 70’s parade of Stowupland Shops.
Before Little China the site was a hairdressers, tropical fish shop, a wool shop and then a Cafe that hoped to get truck trade from the A14. Apparently it was not successful. Underneath the takeaway are the remains of a WW2 bomb shelter which has been filled in. Behind the site a large field was used for cycle speedway.
Dent’s Newsagents. 9, Thorney Green Road. Pam Dent took the shop over from Mr Leonard (Tubby) Seaman. He sold ‘papers, fruit/veg and almost anything’. He also had a paper shop in Stowupland Street. For more details see Devon Road Shops
( Len and George Wilden were step brothers, see below. Mrs Seaman was George Wilden’s mother). To reach the newsagents section it was first necessary to walk through a ‘Spar shop’.
Upland’s Wool Shop – Peggy Clark
Jennie’
s Hair Salon – Jennifer Salmon’s first salon was on the forecourt where the Co-op shop and petrol station are now. She moved to Devon Road in 1972, staying there for 6 years. She bought nos 1 & 3 Devon Road, living in No 1 with her salon on the ground floor of No3. Before becoming a hair salon George Wilden had a photo and printing business next to Seaman’s.
Jenny Salmon closed her hairdressers in in 1978. There was an association with an Annette and Orla Browne. Ear Piercing were also carried out.
In September 1978 planning permission was sought to change Spencer’s (the butcher’s) to a hairdressers and retaining the first floor flat.
See more on Hairdressing in Stowupland
In the 1980’s a planning application was made for a Tropical Fish shop to go into shops 9 to 11.
In 2018 Telstar printed the following memories: ‘Pamela Dent was the daughter of the Moore family and, when her father died, became Charmian and Managing Director of the news whoelsale business that he had started under the name of Durrants. She bought the Stowupland news agency (the middle shop in the row of three) from Leonard Seaman in the late 1960s. The news wholesale business was sold to W.H. Smith & Son Ltd in 1987 and the village shop sold in 1992, when Pamela and her husband retired.
Joan and John Battle remembered the row of shops, with the hairdressers on the left, Dents in the middle and a wool shop on the right. Dents sold groceries, as well as being a newsagents and, for a time, Mr and Mrs Dent lived above the shop. Mrs Weller worked in the shop and Jack Edwards was involved on the newsagents side. Joan used to go in early to get the papers ready for the paper boys, who arrived at 6.30 a.m. On wet days, when the papers were ready for the boys, they would put them into the air radi shelter(now filled). the entrance to which was five steps down in front of the shop. Joan remembers a break in at the shop. in the 1980s, the first of a series of thefts in the area.’
Today Little China is still trading but the rest of the parade has been converted to residential housing.
