Albion Ltd

A Norfolk shop selling second world war-era clothes is all the rage, Enid Blyton names are back in favour, and this summer millions of people who would never have dreamed of holidaying in Britain a decade ago will head for England's newly fashionable seaside. Whatever happened to the great English inferiority complex? Andy Beckett investigates



In 1992 Will Brown and Marie Willey left London to start a shop in Norwich. He was a fashion designer, she was a fashion stylist, but both of them were perhaps a bit too thoughtful and droll for their jobs. They wanted to try something different. As well as clothes they shared two other less predictable interests. They loved the nostalgic atmosphere of the Norfolk seaside - they spent their holidays in a caravan at Cromer - and the evocative but often forgotten English domestic design of the 30s and 40s.

Article continues
Brown and Willey called their new Norwich shop Old Town and filled it with enamel bread bins, plain metal kettles straight out of George Orwell, heavy old whisks and rolling pins, and old-fashioned balls of coarse brown string. And then they waited for customers. Old Town was on one of Norwich's most attractively ancient streets; the shop was featured very favourably in the Sunday Telegraph. But the public reaction was not what they expected. "We used to have faces looking in the window," says Willey. "People would point at the balls of string. Then they would say, 'What's that about?'" Sometimes, she remembers, the eyes of these onlookers would fill with what could have been tears of laughter. She pauses. "Or perhaps it was just the cold wind."

Thirteen years later, the shop in Norwich is long gone. Yet Brown and Willey are still selling the same version of Englishness, and with rather more success. Old Town is now a clothes business. It offers "spartan and institutional" garments designed by Brown - baggy high-waisted trousers, buttoned-up boxy jackets, a bit like better-cut uniforms or civilian dress from the second world war - through a website and a shop in the north Norfolk market town of Holt. The clothes come in muted ration-book colours but with modern credit-boom prices: the trousers cost up to £145. Visiting the shop, for the great majority of Old Town's customers, requires a long twisting country journey by car or train and taxi. But people come: "They're media, they're architects, they're designers," says Willey. "They like the details on the clothes." And nowadays no one laughs at Old Town's shop windows, with their woodwork painted a challenging shade of battleship grey. In fact, quite the contrary. "It's amazing the number of people who ring up and say, 'We've just driven past your shop. What's the paint number?'"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,2763,1489982,00.html