Blue Anchor

It's believed the first supermarket in the town was Victor Values, built on the site of the old Phoenix cinema. This became a Tesco store in the early 1970s and is now occupied by WH Smith. Sainsbury's presence in the town has been long-standing, but company expansion in the early 1960s led them to build Bishop’s Stortford’s first 'major' supermarket on the site of the 17th century Anchor public house shortly after it closed on 31 March 1963. Sainsbury's finally vacated this site in late 2006, moving to a much larger purpose-built store within the new Jackson Square shopping centre

The pub had gone by many different names over the centuries, the earliest reference to it being in churchwardens’ accounts of 1681, when landlord John Mardens paid 4d rent for the ‘Blew Anchor in South Street’. In 1743 it was referred to as the Old Anchor, and in 1751 its licencee, John Choate, was described as a disorderly and abusive man. Hawkes Brewery later took over the pub and in 1869 it was once again 'officially' referred to as the Blue Anchor. Locals, however, called it the Anchor or the Bell and Anchor. Since the 16th century, six public houses have been recorded in South Street – today there are none. MORE PICTURES

Old Post Office

In 1921 the town's post office moved from Market Square to new premises alongside the Methodist Church – ironically on the same site of an earlier post office opened in 1874. It moved to its current position in (Lower) South Street in 1964. A part of the original 1921 building still stands here as No 34, the remainder being demolished in 1997 and replaced by the Iceland Frozen Food store.

To the rear of the post office in (former) Nails Lane, had stood the town's original telephone exchange. A small building it was adequate for its purpose when few people in the town had use of a telephone, but by the late 1960s a growing population led to the building of a new exchange at Station Road (See Guide 11). The old exchange was then sold and converted for business use but finally demolished in the early 1990s.

Empress Ballroom

An alleyway between the Methodist church and No 34 once gave entrance to the Empress Ballroom (also known as Madam Black's School of Dancing), a hall at the rear of the post office that was bought and renovated in the 1950s by Syd Black and his wife. A local couple, they had previously run a dance school in the Baptist Church Hall at Portland Road, but here, for a fee of two shillings (10p), they gave would-be Fred Astairs’ and Ginger Rogers’ dancing lessons to the recorded sounds of Joe Loss, Victor Sylvester and Edmundo Ross.

It’s hard to comprehend now, but in the early 1960s entertainment on a Sunday night was virtually non-existent in this country, more especially in country towns like Bishop’s Stortford. Local people could visit a pub between the hours of 7pm and 10.30pm, and that was about it – not even the town’s cinema wasn’t allowed to open on a Sunday until 1966.

But by the late 1950s and early 60s, rock 'n' roll music was coming to the fore. The Big Band sound was being replaced by guitars and drums, and formal dancing gave way to the Jive and the Twist. In February 1962 the owners of the Empress Ballroom embraced this change by starting the Sunday Club, a regular venue for local rock ‘n’ roll bands to entertain the town's young people on this otherwise boring day. The club was an unqualified success, but for reasons unknown closed in December that same year. The hall was finally pulled down in 1997 for redevelopment.
MORE PICTURES