Re your article on the old Sainsbury’s store on Winchester High Street (Sainsbury’s celebrates 100 years of serving Winchester community). I grew up in Winchester and remember that store very well.

Despite being built in 1922 it was really Victorian inside with lots of tiles and mirrors behind the marble counters.

I must have been quite young as I couldn’t work out why the shop seemed so long, of course the mirrors doubled the size of it!

It smelt absolutely amazing, mostly of smoked bacon!

Marks and Spencer on the opposite corner also smelt wonderful with its open fruit counters at the front of the shop.

Sainsbury’s has a really big archive of photos so I would love to see one in the Chronicle. It would revive a lot of memories. I am only 68 so there are plenty of us about who would remember this wonderful shop.

It is amazing how those old Victorian style shops hung on in Winchester even when the era of supermarkets had got going.

Opposite on the High Street was MacFisheries, one of the first.

When the smaller old time shops on the High Street finally closed, their frontages were removed to the museum along with some of their contents. 

I loved to look in Rugg the tobacconist’s window under The Pentice and to see the Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, and cocktail cigarettes with their multicoloured wrappers, again a fantastic smell of fresh tobacco in the shop and I’m sure customers loved the special-ness of shopping there.

It was quite farsighted of the museum people to obtain these shopfronts as they really evoke a past time. It would have been impossible though to save anything from Sainsbury's as it was much too big. Pity you couldn’t bottle the smoked bacon smell though!

Penny Clamp (nee Lucas)

Lime Cottage, Oasby, Nr Grantham.