A new shop is Coming Soon to Stert Street – well in time for Christmas. It is underneath the Utopia Beauty Salon and will sell some of the beauty products used upstairs as well as new lines.

Stert Street was once the ugly duckling on the Abingdon retail scene – it was the street of empty shop fronts. It was the street where a child in a buggy had to breathe in traffic fumes. But times have changed, and Stert Street has been transformed.

Stert Street got good wide pavements out of Abits (Abingdon Integrated Transport Strategy) and better air quality. Other streets did less well. The High Street pavements are still waiting to be rectified two years after they were laid.

Thorntons may have closed and the shop is looking a ghost of its former self….

but there is still an independent sweet and chocolate shop in Abingdon, on Stert Street, who do have chocolates to fill some of the space in the market left by Thorntons.

Sweet Chocolate are best known for their retro / traditional sweets and more recently American candy bars.  Find out more of their recent innovations on their facebook page.

I hope they have a successful run up to Christmas … once they have managed to get over the Halloweenies.  We don’t want any more ghost shops.

This Blog reported 4 years ago that Hathaways had closed, and back in April showed scaffolding going up round the old baccy shop. Hathaways was the shop on the High Street that sold smoking paraphernalia and souvenirs.

Since then the interior, the back and the roof have been rebuilt and the scaffolding removed.

A little bit of Hathaways still lives on in another shop in Abingdon. The walking sticks, and tobacco pipes were taken over by E R Goffs after Hathaways closed.

There are also a range of  bubble pipes and colourful baccy tins. As well as its core newsagency business Goffs tries to fill gaps in the Abingdon market in an enterprising way. For example, they are also a Western Union agency for people who need to send money abroad.

Mrs Goff still owns the freehold, and visited recently for the first time in a while, and was shown a display of  improvements since the current lease holders took over. It is part of the lease conditions, I believe, that the name Goff stays above the door.