Old butchers shop in Finchley

[Zebra]

I was working today in the basement of an estate agency in North London. We were trying to feed some cables into the gap between the boarded basement ceiling and the floorboards above, but found that the gap was stuffed full of stuff, which fell out on our heads every time we reached up there. We gave up and run the cables on the surface. Speaking to the shop owner about it, he told us that the shop was purpose built in the early 1800s as a butchers shop, and what is now the basement would have been the slaughterhouse. The ground levels outside would have been lower, and they would have led the animals straight in there. He pointed out the gulleys on the floor of the basement and the big containers built in to the wall which would have held ice. It was very interesting.
The reason the gap between the ceiling and the floor above was full was from years and years of spreading sawdust onto the shop floor above to soak up any blood, and it finding its way between the boards.
Think I might wash my hair tonight.

 

[jocelyn plummer]

yuk!

The house we had in Walsingham was at the low point of the medieval Friday market square, and we were told that all the slaughter debris ran down into the yard between our backdoor and the outbuildings.

 

[Penners]

Think I might wash my hair tonight.

Is the building listed? If so, you may need LBC before you're allowed to dispose of original features in this way.

 

[vicky whitworth]

I think you stripey folk call it 'fur' not 'hair' - wash my fur tonight. One of my team has just left work saying she's off to shave her spaniel this weekend. I was lost for words. The stuff young people come out with

 

[piper]

Around 1979, when we lived in a rather run-down but very cosy flat on the top two floors over an empty shop on Essex Road, Islington, one Saturday morning at breakfast we noticed curtains of fine dust trickling down the walls all round the kitchen. We fortunately got up and took refuge in the doorway, because the next minute the entire ceiling came down. All the space between this ceiling and the floor above was filled with rubble and debris obviously swept in there when the back of the house was repaired after being bombed during the war. There were several old bottles & jars, and a pair of round 'John Lennon' wire-framed spectacles among the brick-ends, plaster and other junk.

 

[discobarry]

Did you wash your hair too then?