Layton’s warehouse, the China shop that won Andover hearts

When he married Hannah French at Newbury in 1843, Zaccheus was described as a hawker. Eight years later, the 1851 census listed Hannah and a three-month daughter Louisa at the Black Bear inn at Newbury, together with a tailor, a silk mercer, a bookseller, a butcher and a milliner, suggesting a gathering of market traders for Newbury market, perhaps the following day. Zaccheus is not among them but probably spent the night in a travelling waggon, together with his stock.

This large Andover shop was certainly a step forward, where basic china and glass for use in the kitchens and bedrooms of the local houses and cottages could be sold from a permanent base. Prosperity must have followed because when Zaccheus died in 1889 he left over £2,000 – an enormous sum in those days. The business was taken on by his son Walter who had been in America and was widowed with a young daughter. He improved the range of stock and it was not long before all the major porcelain factories were represented there, as well as preserving the ‘bread and butter’ trade that had served his father so well.

Walter married Rosa Banks in 1891 and the couple had two children but the marriage foundered within a few years, and by 1895 Walter had departed the scene, leaving Rosa in charge of the shop. She employed a manger William Godley and this 1907 picture probably shows Godley outside, together with Rosa’s son Leslie who was destined to take over the shop after her death in 1936.

Under Rosa’s stewardship the shop continued to prosper, though she may have reined back on the more expensive porcelain that her husband had stocked. Day books, surviving from the 1930s, show much of the trade was in the domestic wares that every local household needed, replacements for broken parts of services, mugs at 3d, 6d and occasionally at 1/9d, as well as a hiring-out service whenever a customer or organisation wanted a quantity of ware for a specific event.

In those days, there was much inter-trading between the various businesses in Andover as each shopkeeper looked no further than his fellow traders whenever goods or services were required. Each helped to support the other and, although they were rivals for trade, they all knew that local circulation of money was good for every business.

Leslie did not marry until 1947 when he was well in his 50s and in 1952 he gave up the shop after a family tenure of 99 years. He died in 1961, living long enough to know that his old family shop would eventually be demolished, something that was said to sadden him. Today most people would remember it as being the premises of greengrocer Reg Elwick.

This is how the site looks now

However, town development plans meant that all the shops behind the Guildhall were compulsorily purchased by the council in 1964; the shops continued to trade for a few more years but were all demolished in 1968.