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‘If we don’t have it, you don’t need it’: an Aladdin’s cave of useful items, the local hardware store is the shop that time forgot

- Catherine Larner

WHETHER you are in need of four candles or fork handles, a bath plug or a pair of shears, there’s still a place in towns and villages across the country where you can be sure to find it. You’ll recognise it by the rows of bedding plants, towers of buckets and baskets of pegs spilling onto the street in front of windows packed with pans, crockery, brushes and tools. Inside, every available surface is stacked with bottles and boxes; shelves upon shelves of tins contain paint in varying hues of salmon, rust, moss and more shades of white than should surely exist. Hoses and watering cans hang from the ceiling, brooms and mops jostle in metal bins, reels of chains and rope span the walls and a counter has drawers bursting with a cornucopia of items to aid and abet our everyday lives. Welcome to the traditional hardware shop.

Step through the doors of Webb Bros and you will instantly pick up notes of paraffin, oil and furniture polish lingering in the air. Servicing the residents of Woodbridge, Suffolk, since 1749, its bay windows showcase ironmongery and gardening tools in a street of timber-frame properties.

The Willis family took over here in 1949, when there were 11 hardware shops in the small market town. Now, there’s only one. Mark Willis is the third generation to be at the helm and lives above the shop. ‘This isn’t a career choice,’ he says. ‘You do it because you love it. It’s a slower pace of life.

‘Every day, people will say: “I don’t suppose you’ve got…” or “It’s a long shot, but…” People come in wanting a plunger and can’t think where else to go—we like to sell stuff that other people don’t.’