Another My Town Monday

This week ( again I'm a bit late) I thought I would write about a lovely shop called Boardmans in the town.

Boardmans is a stationary / book shop which also sells art and craft materials and office supplies. I love to spend time browsing in there. It reminds me of my transition from primary school to secondary school as at the time it was the place to go to buy all of the recommended books and equipment such as the dreaded geometry set in a metal tin ,Oxford English dictionary and of course a Good news Bible ( great for pressing flowers and bashing fellow students over the head with!).

The smell of the shop is unique too. It's a mixture of oldy worldy moth eaten cardbard, old lady's perfume and printers ink crossed with the aroma of brand new shiny books still in their wrappers.

I also bought my first ink pen from the shop, which at the age of 11 yrs was a very special occasion.I still have the pen ( somewhere!), it was a silver coloured Shaeffer with scrolls around the edge and I loved it.Before my Mum paid for it, the lady in the shop who was about 82yrs insisted that I try it out and kindly gave me a whole sheet of blotting paper on which to write. I felt very grown up. The pen had a beautiful box with blue silk lining and I loved it!



Boardmans itself is a magnificent double-fronted building, originally built as a private house. It stands on the former site of the Falcon public house, itself demolished in the 1750s as a result of a local road-widening scheme.

Arthur Boardman was a well-respected figure in Stortford and a man of many parts. He supported lectures at the Corn Exchange, promoted literacy in the town by arranging essay and poetry competitions, and put his considerable talent as an artist to good use by drawing political cartoons.In fact, it was his love of literature that eventually led him to convert part of his home into a bookshop. When he finally bought the property in 1900 he expanded the bookshop to the whole of the ground floor and lived in the rooms above.



The stone carvings mounted on the brick pillars supporting the shop’s large window frames are all representations of various herbs used in medicine. These date from 1885 when the building was being restored, each carving created on the pavement outside the shop by Italian workmen, primarily engaged to add mosaics to the altar of St Michael’s church. Wrought iron railings were a feature of the shop’s windowsills up until 1914, at which time they were taken down for salvage to aid the war effort.

A regular town event at the turn of the 20th century was the parade of work horses in Causeway, after which they were brought to North Street for judging and sale by auction.

The worn stone steps at the shop’s entrance ( still there today) were the auctioneer's platform. Sir Walter Gilbey, when he lived at Elsenham would often bring part of his harvest of peppermint and lavender to Speechly & Milbank's for distilling, the fragrant end product later used as gifts for his family and friends.

Prominent above the shop’s entrance stands the original White Hart emblem of the 1st Herts Light Horse regiment ( and also the symbol for the county of Hertfordshire) especially made in 1862 for the regiment’s barracks at Silver Leys .

When the regiment disbanded in 1868, Major William Holland rescued the stag and later mounted it on the fascia above his grocery shop at the corner of Barrett Lane. And there it stood until 1983 when the grocery store was demolished and replaced by the present building, owned by HSBC.

The bank paid for restoration of the 'weathered' stag that took three years to complete, and on its return in 1986 was placed above Boardman’s entrance.

As a little girl, my Mum used to live in the Greengrocers opposite Boardmans . She used to tell me how she would sit on her window sill talking to the "Hart" and telling it stories before she went to bed every night.


This September my son Sam goes to secondary school. I have a list of books to buy and I'm sure that I'll be paying another visit to the shop again very soon.