A Day Trip to Kilmarnock

[down south]

What other significant shops used to be along King Street ? We've already mentioned Marks and Spencer's and Boots, which were at Nos 72 and 66 respectively, on the opposite side of the street to Lauder's. Marks and Spencer had a well-used back entrance on Mill Lane, while Boots was just on the corner as you came out of the lane. As Brian said, it was quite a big shop; I seem to remember it even sold records. This photo looks a bit earlier than the 1960s:

http://www.ayrshirehistory.com/kilmarno ... ing_st.jpg

The steeple near the end of the street was the Town Hall, while the imposing building partway along, and the domed one in the distance, were both banks.

Then of course there was also the third of the big three of chain stores, Woolworths, a bit further towards the cross at No 36. The before picture of the pair below shows it, with Grafton's next door, and looks like it dates from the sixties or seventies. You can see a little bit of Lauder's frontage on the LHS, and of course the description of the setting as being Tichfield Street is completely wrong. What certainly isn't wrong though is the comment attached, that the street as it used to be looks a good deal more impressive than in the modern scene .

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53482954@N ... 8965564726

There were plenty of other chain stores too, like the usual grocers Cooper's (57 ), Lipton's (82 ), and Massey's ( 103 ); Clydesdale electrical ( 97 ), fashion shops like Paige and Dorothy Perkins, and a Wimpy Bar at No 75. There were also notable local firms, like Paterson's Pianos and TV at No 81, or Lamont the tailors , where my Dad used to buy his suits; until that is, it burned spectacularly to the ground one night at the end of the sixties, and was replaced by a new shop for John Menzies.





Another modern shop building, opposite Marks and Spencer's, was Saxone Shoes ( 79 ); I had no idea at the time that they were a local firm , with their factory right there in Kilmarnock. But there were still also , here and elsewhere in the town centre, some deliciously old-fashioned shops; perfectly neat and well-kept some of them, but with their tall windows , gold-lettered frontage and old-time interiors they looked absolutely unchanged since Edwardian days , like Henry Smith, Hatter and Hosier at No 95,which can be seen in the centre of this picture . Never saw quite such quaint survivals anywhere other than Kilmarnock.

http://www.ayrshirehistory.com/kilmarno ... ab_d_n.jpg

Susan

[bobnetau]

Used to get all my shoes at Saxone as I had a very narrow foot and Saxone made all their shoes on lots of fittings. Another factory that I don't think has had a mention yet is BMK carpets.

[down south]

Up beyond the Town Hall we come to the Cross. Which used to be a busy roundabout, the hub where half a dozen or more streets met; but now it's completely pedestrianised, and several of the streets have disappeared from existence, with the Mall walling off the eastern end:

http://www.ayrshirescotland.com/towns/i ... -Cross.JPG

They've made a pleasant square of it I see , with plenty of floral adornments, and that presumably is a statue of Burns in the centre of the view. That wasn't there back in the sixties, but nonetheless I had one of my first encounters with Burns right on this spot; getting a first sight of the Burns commemorative stamps that came out in the 1960s ,on special display in the window of the old John Menzies on the corner of Duke Street. I think it must have been soon after that that our teacher Mrs Blythe started introducing us to his poems.

Duke Street of course is one of the vanished streets, and here's a reminder of how it looked, busy with cars and buses and with the Palace Theatre visible at the far end. John Menzies was on the left-hand corner.





Hay's, for which you can see the sign, was a furniture shop which also had a branch in Ayr. Between that and the Clydesdale bank on the corner was Holmes bookshop ; and just out of picture to the right was William Scarlett, a big fruiterer and florist. I notice there's still a Scarlett's florist in the town centre today, though a much smaller affair, up Portland Street by the viaduct.

Then between Scarlett's and the Town Hall was another of Kilmarnock's department stores, Lewis's. This was apparently Lewis of Kilmarnock and no connection to the more famous store in Glasgow; at any rate we never deigned to visit it. But it looks more impressive than I remembered in this picture which looks to date from about the thirties:

http://www.ayrshirehistory.com/kilmarno ... k_th_b.jpg

Susan

[down south]

Up beyond the Cross runs Portland Street. It used to be a busy shopping area, but it looks to have fallen on sadder days now, with much of one side of the street having been demolished and turned into a car-park. ( The only merit of that being that the railway viaduct has been exposed to view, adding interest to the scene. )

It was all very different back in the sixties .Starting at the bottom corner opposite the bank, at No 2 Portland Street there was Lauder's ironmongers; this was David rather than Hugh Lauder, but you'd guess there would have been a family connection in the past . ( There was also, in King Street, a David Lauder, bakers, so the Lauder clan clearly had most of the bases covered where shopping in Kilmarnock was concerned. )

Heading on up, this side of the street in particular was packed with well-known names; K Shoes, Burton's and Dunn's menswear, another Massey's and another Boots', Macfisheries, City Bakeries and R S McColl .There were also a few more notable local firms. At No 32 was McMurray's, another department store, this time a well up-to-date one; they branched out in the early seventies with fashion stores in other local towns, including Saltcoats.

The same can't be said for the rather old-fashioned Lind's, which was at No 78, on the corner above the junction with West George Street. This would be the building:

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Kilmar ... 4,,0,14.85

But note the old-world courtliness with which on the back of their receipt , at as late a date as 1970, they thank you for your patronage and solicit your recommendation:







Susan

[down south]

Also leading off from the Cross, in a roughly westward direction, another little street takes you to Kilmarnock's historic church, the Laigh Kirk. Here's a view of its clock tower from the early seventies,with the buildings crowding it even more closely than they do now. ( Dexter's on the right, at No 1 Cheapside, was another clothing shop. )



It also acts as the entry point to the area that lies between King Street and John Finnie Street, a maze of small streets and lanes that still looks little changed today, and fascinating to me then to explore.Worth a look at a street map of the way the town centre used to be in the 1960s; which also shows the similar backwaters that have disappeared on the east side of King Street . I based it on a map we had of the one-way system, hence the arrows , and the focus on car-parks:



The main artery through is Bank Street, cosily narrow, and in those days at least bustling with shoppers in the many little shops that lined it. I have fond memories of a visit to Ayrshire Wireless, the TV and radio shop there; when in a cluttered backroom workshop my Dad bought an old TV identical to ours with the intention of using the parts to fix it. Dad being Dad, he ended up with both of them in working order ! Notice their connection with our Saltcoats radio man Harry Donaldson:



Through the middle of that area meanwhile,in behind the buildings, runs the stream which I now know is the Kilmarnock Water, on its way to join the River Irvine. I remember it well, because in the days before the one-way system we used to park in the St Marnock Street car-park and take a short-cut through to King Street, crossing the rushing,rocky, narrowly-confined waters by a little high-up bridge, and coming out just beside Lauder's. A very different bridge-crossing from the Auld Brig that greeted our arrival in Ayr.

Susan

[meekan]

Susan,
the St.Marnock Street car park was a previous site for the A1 Buses 50's early 60's Before they moved to Strand Street.

[down south]

Thanks Meekan, I thought that must have been the place you were referring to before. It was on the cleared site of some old building, and still with the walls around the sides, with a handy doorway in the back wall which was the way we took for our short-cut. As a toddler I was always wild to know what was in the other direction from the door, but when eventually I was indulged in this wish I was most disappointed to find myself soon back on the road we had come in by !

Susan

[down south]

And so back again we go to John Finnie Street, where we came in. Something of the history of John Finnie, and how he had a street named after him, can be found hereand in the post that follows it.

It's been called one of the finest streets in Scotland, and I was certainly very impressed with it from the first time I saw it; long, arrow-straight, lined with sober dignified stone buildings interspersed with patches of greenery;the only thing that spoiled it back then were some big advertising hoardings up near the top end. Some of it looks a bit sad now, alas.

Also up at the top end, of course, were the entrances to two of Kilmarnock's most important buildings: the Infirmary and the railway station.

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Kilmar ... =12,0,,0,0

The hospital, now I presume gone, wasn't directly visible: here's a picture of it:

http://www.ayrshirehistory.com/kilmarno ... rmaray.jpg

Instead it was approached from here through a dark tunnel, which on the evening when I first saw it and had to enter it looked especially cavernous and ominous; suitably so perhaps, for a place concerned with matters of life and death( though there were no such serious connotations, I hasten to add, to my visit).

But in contrast to this mouth of Hades was the way to the station, a roadway winding its way up, quite romantically I always felt, to a " castle " atop the hill. It has particularly happy associations for me because the reason for our visits there was to meet my big sister Anne off the train back from Down South ( or less often to see her off ), with a holiday period in joyous prospect; the fact that it was such an attractive spot was a bonus.

I'm delighted to find that I can take Streetview all the way up to the station forecourt where we parked, and remind myself how it was gazing from a height down the length of John Finnie Street as I loved to do back then .

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.61194 ... 56!6m1!1e1

And since none of us appear to have any more to recall for the time being, there's where I'll bid farewell for now to this day trip to Kilmarnock.

Susan

[glasspeter932]

Does anyone have any colour pictures of post offices in Kilmarnock including Beansburn, John Finnie Street, New Farm Loch, London Road, Bonnyton, Riccarton, Knockinlaw, Titchfield Street, Bellfield and The Foregate with the yellow and red rectangular oval shaped 1975 Post Office logo with the striped Royal Mail style text and the matching outline? I’m also looking for early to mid-1990s colour pictures of Tesco and Iceland facing each other at Fowlds Street and Coral, KFC, Burger King, The Garage, The Galleon Centre, Global Video and J.H. Donald at John Finnie Street, King Street and Queen’s Drive, Titchfield Street and Grange Street, Kilmarnock College at Holehouse Road, the Bellfield Tavern at Welbeck Street, the Pizza Hut restaurant which is now a Greggs at Low Glencairn Street, the Safeway petrol and supermarket there and at West Shaw Street along with the BMK office building there, the BMK Riverside Mills carpet factory at Barbadoes Road, the Blackwood Brothers carpet factory at Western Road, Hunslet-Barclay at West Langlands Street, the William Low/Tesco supermarket, the Howard Park Hotel and the Rowallan Creamery dairy factory at Glasgow Road and the Gleneagles and Douglas Rayburn shoe and carpet yarn factory at Mill Street, Glacier Metal at Riccarton, the railway station building with the 1983 Strathclyde Transport branding and the bus station at Green Street shortly before Stagecoach took over Western Scottish Omnibuses and of course the entrances to the Burns Mall including the one near Greggs opposite the soon to be demolished multi-storey car park and the underpass entrance in red.