I grew up in the city of Kingston-upon-Hull, in East Yorkshire, and I always loved a trip down to the old town if it involved a visit to the arcade. This was partly because it had my favourite shop – the joke shop still in place today (see Hepworth Arcade) – but also just because the arcade felt like a magical place, full of interesting shops and quirky people.
Arcades today are often the home of interesting independent shops – all the big branded retailers prefer the big characterless shopping mall or the High Street (if they are still open for real-time shopping at all. So, discovering an existing arcade in a town or city we visit has always been a delight.
I have been writing blogs and running websites like this one since my years in Australia. My first project there was to swim in all the ocean baths in New South Wales. My OceanPoolsNSW website is still up and running, with comments coming every week in from others who love these pools as much as me, and can share memories going back way before my time in Australia. That website was my first attempt to develop the format of describing my own experience at a place and then researching the stories from the past of the venue.
Arcades were part of my second website when we moved to Victoria in Australia. But Vintage Victoria expanded to also map out other structures like old cinemas, racecourse grandstands and lighthouses.
That would be too big a project for the UK, let alone the rest of the world, and good websites exist already for vintage cinemas and for lighthouses.
The number of old shopping arcades remaining in the UK is under 100, making that a manageable project. In addition, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet attempted to visit them all or create a community around them. So that is why I opted to embark on my own Arcades Project.
I am semi-retired now after a multi-faceted working life, teaching languages, working in international relations, human rights, working as an EU official, and more recently as a remedial massage therapist.
The thread connecting those very diverse jobs is communication and story-telling, as important in foreign language learning as it is in asking a client in pain to tell the story of their injury or soreness. That is why my Arcades Project is aimed at telling stories and at connecting across time and across places.
