I'm not sure how you define 'supermarket' but where I grew up, on the south edge of London in the '50s, we had a
Payantake, which was our only example of a self-serve establishment (other than the public library) and was of a size that would now be called a 'convenience store'. My father liked to point out that it should more correctly be called Takeandpay - though as far as I recall he never set foot in the place. (He also complained, later on when a new shop opened up calling itself a 'Superette'
)
On the opposite side of the High Street stood
Sainsbury's - emphatically
not a supermarket at that time (say 1955) but still the best and most popular grocer's in town. Inside, like its neigbouring shops, it was narrow dark and deep, with about 7 separate counters (3 on each side, one at the far end) for different foodstuffs such as cheese, butter, bacon, sausages etc. Housewives would patiently queue at each counter in turn, giving perfect opportunity to receive and pass on gossip as the queues slowly rotated. I found it incredibly tedious apart from the endless fascination that was the butter counter.
Next to Sainsbury's was
Boots which was a similar size and shape inside - but the inner sanctum of Boots was, oddly, a lending library set up in opposition to the much larger public one which was a bit further away. We had a book that my mother had borrowed from there, it was so far overdue that the fine would have far exceeded the cost of a replacement copy and she never had the face to return it - the title has always stuck in my mind -
Leopard In My Lap.
Standing on the corner over the road was the
Odeon cinema. Sometime around the time that Billy Cotton sang:
They turned our local Palais
into a bowling alley and
fings ain't what they used ter bethe building was gutted and turned into a
Fine Fare - our first real supermarket. That would be the early '60s I think. True son of my father, I never went in there.
