Church Street sits on the broad smudge of a boarder that fractions St John's Wood from Marylebone. It is a thoroughfare from Edgware Road to Lisson Grove, at one end cafés and carpet shops and places that promise everything for a pound, though almost nothing is. Here there is a daily street market, fresh fish sold next to clothes that must smell of them, fruit and veg, piles of plastic shoes. At the other, at the Lisson Grove end, are windows filled with walnut desks, club chairs, lamps shaped like faraway animals. These are the antique shops, where a single purchase might come in at twice what it would cost to buy out all the stalls only a few metres away. It is a tale of two halves, Church Street.
In this half is a building that has stood there since the 1880, Alfies Antiques Market. It wasn’t always Alfies: when it was built, it was called Jordan’s and named for the family who owned it. Jordan — William Leonard — was a draper, adept enough that over the coming decades his business became a department store. Adept, Jordan, but not ageless: by the cruel Seventies, he and his brother needed to sell. The area did not need this store or many others either — by then, Church Street was a derelict run of boarded-up windows and closed pubs.
