From time to time in this series of photographic memories we feature what we like to call 'Middlewich personalities' and here's one of them: Mrs Mary Costello, specially posed outside the family's grocery shop in Kinderton Street. Note the extremely dilapidated state of the shop by this time. It was in its final days before demolition to make way for the wider version of Kinderton Street which runs from Holmes Chapel Road railway bridge (or Station bridge) down the hill to join St Michael's Way at the Town Bridge. The Costello family had shops in various parts of Middlewich over the years. There was one in Wheelock Street and another, long gone, on the corner of Brooks Lane and Booth Lane, backing onto the canal tow-path on the approach to the bridge over the canal junction. There does not appear to be enough room for there ever to have been a shop there, even if you allow for possible road-widening, but there is a tell-tale curve in the bridge parapet showing that a building once stood there. If you have a photograph of that shop we'd be delighted to see it and feature it here.
Update (May 2017)
The shop in question appears at the very beginning of this precious bit of film footage:
GLIMPSES
Returning to our Kinderton Street shop, you can just make out that the window display was in the traditional style with canned fruit and toilet rolls in little pyramids. The child on the extreme right will be in her mid to late forties now (I think it's a little girl, but it's a bit hard to tell with that 1970s 'page-boy' hairstyle)
Incidentally there's a good view of this shop in 'Middlewich' by Brian Curzon and Paul Hurley ('Images of England', Tempus Publishing 2005) but it is mysteriously and unaccountably labelled as 'Leadsmithy Street'.
Mary was the wife of Clarence Costello, councillor and one-time chairman of the UDC. She only died in recent years in her 90s.
