Our theme of ‘Antique Shops Then and Now’ continues with part III. The main antique shop ‘Then and Now’ focus is ‘Shirley Brown’ – an antique shop in Tredington, Warwickshire. Shirley Brown was established in 1923 in Shirley in the West Midlands. Our friend, the antique dealer David Love of Harrogate, who initially worked in his mother’s antique shop, Araxie Love in Shipston-on-Stour, near Tredington, tells us that the business was actually owned by the antique dealer Joseph Brown but Joseph called it ‘Shirley Brown’ as there was another dealer called Brown trading in Shirley at the time. Shirley Brown moved to Tredington in 1948, opening his business in a large historic house – here’s Shirley Brown’s shop in the 1950s.
Here is the building (no longer an antique shop; it’s now a private home), in 2025 – it’s remained remarkably the same over the past 70 years (even the weather vane remains!)
The building that ‘Shirley Brown’ chose for their antique shop is a typical historic house antique shop business and continued a trend for antique shops trading from historic buildings that goes back to at least the 1920s in Britain – see numerous blog posts on this theme (if you search ‘historic house’ in the Blog search function you’ll see them all).
Shirley Brown was elected to the British Antique Dealer’s Association (BADA) in 1933 and traded from Tredington until the mid 1980s when the business closed, after almost 40 years in Tredington and 60 years trading overall. Tredington is a quiet village rather than a bustling commercial centre, but was obviously a profitable location for an antique shop – it also had ‘The Thursday Shop’, owned and run by Margaret Jameson, who established her antique shop there in 1940 (and also was still trading in the early 1980s). Margaret is more famous as the author of ‘The Thursday Shop’ an autobiographical account of her life as an antique dealer, published in 1969 under the pseudonym of ‘Anne Summers’. Her shop was only open to retail shoppers on a Thursday (hence the title of her book).
Mark
antiquedealersblog 
Leave a comment