Harris Arcade, Reading

Reading’s Harris Arcade could be an Art Deco gem. Built in the late 1920s, the individual shop units still have lots of original features, with their glass fronts and wooden shop frames. But with over half the units lying empty in 2023, and very little footfall along its long walkway from Friar Street to Station Road, let’s just say this arcade is not currently living up to its potential.

It’s a shame for those shops which have survived, and made it through the pandemic and financial crises. These include a stylish milliner’s, a very popular games and comics shop, a vinyl record store, a men’s grooming shop, which also sells whisky (!), and an eclectic mix of toy shop, Chinese medicine, tailor’s alterations, barbers, Indian grocers, and a pedicure salon. But as you move to the bend in the arcade and round towards Station Road, the units become more and more deserted.

I hope somebody contacts me to tell me that lots of new businesses and organisations have moved in, or that there are plans for some new initiative to spark life back into this arcade. Harris Arcade opened in the summer of 1929, just a few months before the crash on Wall Street. It managed to survive the Depression and the bomb which fell on Friar Street just near the arcade in February 1943, but in 2023 it needs some TLC…

The arcade appears to have been built on the site of the childhood home of academic Goldwin Smith. A plaque in his name stands at the entrance to the arcade. His career took him from Oxford to Cornell to Toronto, but his views are an interesting mix, being pro-abolition of slavery but anti women’s suffrage (and against women being allowed at ‘men’s’ colleges), an anti-imperialist but also an anti-semite.

My favourite shop today

This is a close-run thing between the milliner’s, which has a fantastic range in its window, and the alterations place, with its window full of adverts from newspapers in times gone by. I could have spent the morning just reading the ads.

My pick of the arcade’s past

The first shop to advertise its arcade premises in 1929 was Goldcrown’s fur shop, selling its fur coats, in mink and moleskin, as well as fox stoles and other clothes you’d never see for sale 100 years on. However it was still going strong 25 years after opening, with its 1954 adverts urging people to bring in their old fur coats for part exchange, and offering the latest in squirrel or musquash.

Another early tenant in the arcade was Madame Maude, who advertised as a masseuse, chiropodist and foot specialist. There was also Caversham furniture shop selling ‘Jacobean dining chairs’ and ‘adjustable arm chairs.’ And then Mrs Scott-Wilson also opened up in the arcade offering ‘permanent wave’ hairdressing ‘by a new scientific method.’ Cranford Tea House, meanwhile, had ‘special terms for business people.’

Jack Buchanan, a star of stage and screen in the 1930s, visited the Harris Arcade in late January 1934 and served snacks out of the newly-opened Sally’s Snack Bar in the Arcade from early morning. The Reading Standard observed that “most of the ladies in Reading seemed to have been seized with a sudden and overwhelming desire for snacks,” with every table in the café booked for its opening day. Apparently Buchanan knew one of the ladies who ran the café, and her husband wrote music for his shows, so he came down to Reading as a favour to his friend.

There was tragedy in the arcade in 1938, when a very young baby, aged between 3 and 5 days old, was found dead in the ladies’ toilet in the arcade, with a white rose laid on its chest. An inquest into the death found no further evidence, and an open verdict was given, so nobody ever found out what had happened.