Old cork shop in Gardner Street

The Cork Shop in 1983

Now in Brighton Museum

By Jackie Fuller, North Laine resident

If you go up to the first floor of Brighton Museum, you'll see an old reconstructed shop with the sign above: "Beall & Co, established 1883". This shop (the 'cork shop') was originally at No 51 Gardner Street and belonged to the family of Doris Abrahams.

The last retail cork shop in the UK

The shop was taken over by Doris' grandfather in 1915 "when the zeppelins started coming over London". He decided it was prudent to remove his family to Brighton and to add to his cork business warehouse in Aldgate. The shop in Gardner Street was then a small factory, but it eventually became probably the last retail cork shop left in the UK.

Doris had to run the business

In the 1950s Doris' father and sister were in the business but, unfortunately, five years after her father died (in 1956), her sister died of leukaemia.  Although married and with two young sons, Doris had to run the business to support her mother.

She said:

“My grandfather had taken on a boy, John Watkins, when he was 14, to learn the trade. He stayed on as manager and helped me to run the business until he retired in his early 80s.

We used to import cork from Spain and Portugal, then cut it to size to make bottle corks for pharmacies, brewers, and home wine-makers, all along the south coast. We also made cork bath mats, carved cork pictures and cork tops for stools. There were originally very many uses for cork, but when plastics and laminates came into being it became almost redundant and, by the 1980s, if I could show a profit of about £5 I'd had a good week. However, by that time my mother had died, so the shop was carried on almost as a hobby.”

When asked how the shop came to be in Brighton Museum, Doris said it was due to sentiment.

“You see,” she said, “John retired when the shop was nearing its centenary, so I kept it open in order to celebrate its 100 years. Then, in 1983, when the premises were being rebuilt from basement to roof, I donated the façade and contents to the Museum. They reconstructed it just as it had always looked and there it stands today - a memento of a now almost defunct industry.”

Original deeds also in the museum

The shop had stood on an ancient site and the original deeds, dating back to the 1750s, are also with the Museum. There is now [2010] a fashion fabric shop where the old "Cork Shop" used to be.

[Previously published with the author's permission in the North Laine Runner, No 122, July/August 1996 and based on extracts from "Doris Abrahams", a chapter in We're not all Rothschilds!, by Leila Abrahams, published by QueenSpark Books, 1994; reprinted in the North Laine Runner, No 206, September/October 2010]