There was also a recent, rather vulgar, innovation apparently called an 'email' from 'Rokey'. One much prefers Vellum Wove:
You write that the side door at the corner shop always led to the flat, and that it seemed to have dual entrances from the main premises and from the side door stairs. But I recently read that before Alf Roberts modernised the shop in 1985 the side door led into the living quarters. Who is right?
Um, with the changing architecture of the Street over the years, who knows? But we don't recall anybody entering the back room via a side door, and nor was there any evidence of such a door in a rare pic of that side of the back room during the Hopkins family's time at the shop in the mid-1970s. But it might be there in the recessed wall. Certainly there are coat hangers nearby.
Even if it was, it would still have been impossible because there was not enough space on the Street's then exterior set representation of the Corner Shop to allow the stairs aperture before the door. The non-existent ceilings were also fun. The Corner Shop's front bedroom window was almost immediately above the sign on the exterior set. But, in the studio, great expanses of wall above the door were often visible.
Not sure if the side door leading to the flat after the Corner Shop expansion in 1985 works that well either. The modernisation of '85 happened very rapidly, but how? The shop area could not have expanded without removing the stairs and relocating them (the shop couldn't have expanded without that) and surely that kind of major structural work takes more time than the storyline allowed? The stairs must have been relocated to lead towards the back of the building, with a new landing at the top, as the side door remained in the same place.
But that was the Street and that was what telly was like then.
