Chichester: clothes, cats and counter-culture in a nostalgic trip back to 1980s

Writer and performer Julie Flower will be remembering her own grandmother in the show which plays Christ Church, Old Market Avenue, Chichester, PO19 1SW on June 13 from 19:00-20:00 – the tale of loveable, eccentric septuagenarian Hilda who has run a second-hand clothes shop for decades. She does it to make money to feed 30 stray cats.

Julie explains: “This show really does have a bit of a dual starting point. I had an itch to do a solo show and to do some writing and I needed to find a subject but then my brother unearthed an article that had been written about my grandmother in The Guardian in 1989. I read it and I knew that I had my subject!

“My grandmother was a self-styled eccentric old lady who ran a second-hand clothes shop in the centre of Sheffield and she ran it from the early 60s to the 90s. As a girl I used to help out every Saturday morning, and the experience – my grandmother and the shop – had a big impact on my life. She died in 2007, aged 89.

“She was known as the cat lady and she had a great variety of shoppers, a great variety of people who would come in to talk. It was like a cross between a therapy space and a theatrical space. She was very socialist. You can imagine Sheffield in the 1980s. She would put up posters decrying Maggie Thatcher. And she also got to know loads of students and also people on the music scene, bands that were just starting then. And she would also dress people who were part of the transgender community or had an alternative lifestyle. She was a non-judgmental straight-talking lady who found things for people and really enjoyed finding them.”

And what would she think of the show?

“At first I think she would be ‘Hang on, why would anybody be interested in having a show about me?’ But then I think she would be quite pleased. She was happy to be interviewed by newspapers. She was quite openly eccentric. I discovered that she even took part in an international research project about eccentricity. For someone that barely left Sheffield she got around!

“The show is a mixture of my own memories and also research in the newspaper archives. I found a couple of articles that I never knew about before, articles about her. I've also talked to people about, people who knew her. I spoke to my dad more about his memories of her. I also said I was looking for things on Facebook and asked people for their memories, and it was great. I had people responding, whether they were punks that were dressed by her or whether they were little girls at the time that walked by and remembered the sparkly brooches.”

The shop didn't really have a name though it was originally known as Matts, though that name fell away over the years: “She was legally separated from my granddad which in the 50s was very unusual but she lived for a good number of years with an Irish comedian called Matt, and originally it was a gift shop with him but it rapidly became a second-hand clothes shop with a bit of bric-a-brac.”