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BBC4. Timeshift, Series 16 Episode 4 – Booze , Beans & Bhajis: the Story of the Corner Shop.
January 2018.

Babita Sharma:
What is it about the British and the corner shop? The corner shop has always been there for us – a
British institution. There are almost more corner shops than there are corners. It was on the front-
line of what was happening in society from the 1940s to the 1990s. It saved our bacon during the
Second World War, and it also became a rite of passage for new immigrants, including my family.
I'm Babita Sharma, and I'm the daughter of shopkeepers.
You often hear that phrase, “We're a nation of shopkeepers”, a nation that's been built on
entrepreneurs and that wealth and that drive of ambition, but I don't think I ever realised any of
that when I was a kid here in this corner shop. I didn't kind of realise that we were part of a much
richer history, a history that dates right back to the Victorian era.

In the 19th century, suburbs were created to house an increasing urban population. But they
needed a local food supply. And the Victorians came up with an ingenious solution:

Dr Polly Russell, historian: Town planners created rows of houses and terraces, in which the house
on the corner of a junction of roads was designed, specifically, to be a shop. It would often have a
large window, a door on the corner in order to attract the largest flow of traffic. And to serve that
local community.

Babita Sharma: Even well into the post-war era, we shopped in this very personal way. But a
shopping revolution was on the horizon, and the little corner shop was about to face its first big
threat.

Stock footage: A transatlantic phenomenon has at last made its mark in British shops: the self-
service store.

Dr Polly Russell: There's no doubt the self-service completely revolutionized the way that we shop.