Sweets in big glass jars and Paris buns: Lost shops of Belfast
Ahead of a new photography exhibition opening in Belfast tomorrow, Ivan Little takes a look at the stories behind the pictures
Street life: shop owners and butchers pose for the camera while going about their work in images taken from Bill Kirk’s exhibition
They're the magical little shops that stood on virtually every street corner in Belfast, selling everything from humbugs to hammers and from Winklepicker shoes to Woodbine cigarettes. Now, decades later, memories of them are something special that money just can't buy.
But the tiny businesses, which were part of the very fabric of Belfast and were immortalised in song by Van Morrison, are being celebrated this week in a photographic exhibition in the city centre. Forty black-and-white pictures taken by former Tourist Board photographer Bill Kirk, from Newtownards, perfectly capture a long lost era in the Seventies, before megastores and supermarkets came along to sound the death knell for many of the open-all-hours corner stores which had previously been the only shopping show in town.
