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It’s that week (again) in July when railway platforms and airport gates get stuffed with some of the most prodigious talent imaginable, all hoping that something extraordinary is about to happen in Edinburgh – and they might just be the next Rowan Atkinson or Mel Giedroyc.
The world's greatest showcase of creative freedom kicks off on Friday 2 August – and what follows over the next three weeks is often messy, usually unscripted, but always beautiful. If you’re still not clear what I’m on about…I’m trying to paint you a picture of the fevered anticipation ahead of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. (I’ll just get my coat.)
With literally thousands of incredible shows and experiences heading to the Scottish Capital right now, it was essential that Mag North intercept the only production that combines South Yorkshire counterculture and cats and is the culmination of a long journey that arguably started with a 1989 Guardian article about unique Sheffield shopkeeper Hilda Flower.
Julie Flower is originally from the Steel City and is an award-winning improviser, actor and writer, with previous ‘Fringe form’ as a performer – but ’Grandma’s Shop’ – the show she’s heading north with this week, heralds her debut as a writer.
Before she accidentally relaunches anarchy in the UK this summer, we had to hear from the talented Ms Flower, who when not ’packing them in’ at the Gilded Balloon, is also a leadership development facilitator, coach and university lecturer. Blimey.
So, what is the story behind Grandma’s Shop?
Julie: “It all started when Hilda, my grandma – had an article written about her in the Guardian by this guy who apparently used to go past the shop and thought it was intriguing. He sometimes wrote for the Guardian but was actually a Psychologist and Psychology researcher.
“My brother happened to send me the article out-of-the-blue about two years ago – and it’s such a great story and it just brought all these memories back, so I decided to try and find the journalist. I found him and wrote to him and he remembered and said: ‘I also featured her in a book’.
“So, it turned out she was published in a book – and then I tracked down someone who used to help in Hilda’s shop. She had an article from the Sheffield Star that I've never seen, called ‘The Cat-woman of Devonshire Street’. I started to think this was really cool.”
Hilda Flower had opened her shop in the early 1960s to support herself following her legal separation from her husband in the 1950s - an event so rare for the time that she was featured on the front page of the local paper.
At first glance, what looked like an ordinary second-hand shop on the city’s trendy Devonshire Street – actually became one of the mainstays of the local counterculture scene in the 80s, with punk musicians and creatives regularly stopping by for items they couldn’t find anywhere else, as well as a chat with ‘Auntie Hilda’ as she was affectionally known in the community.
“I remember her creating what I suppose we'd call a ‘safe space’ now. A space where anyone could come in and sit and have a chat. It was an informal space like some of the social spaces that we miss now, where people can actually just go and have a chat. There'd be people who might be having troubles in their life or be down on their luck, or maybe exploring aspects of their identity and those sorts of things. And she didn't judge. She just found what people needed. She was a shopkeeper who lived life on her own terms and knew her own mind – and I think that's where some of the countercultural stuff comes in.”
Julie’s one-woman show looks at family, memories, celebrating difference and the stories that items in second-hand shops have to tell. Having worked at the shop when she was a teenager every Saturday until it closed in the mid-1990s – our dramaturg clearly has a wealth of material to draw on.
“It was that kind of old-fashioned second-hand shop. And I think that made it attractive to people like Punks who would go in there. They were probably quite happy about the fact she had a poster up at the back of the shop with a picture of Margaret Thatcher, which she'd coloured the eyes in red and it said: ‘Don't vote for this evil woman’. She made her views known.
“She would save particular items, like perhaps larger sizes for instance, for people who were exploring their gender identity. She would obviously sell things to people who were unemployed, so needed [to source] things that were cheaper. People who were living a more creative life, like in bands and stuff like that, loved her and the shop.
“Being anti-establishment – and the counterculture thing for an elderly lady was seen as really quite cool and she was always surrounded by different, younger people. Quite unusual for the time, I think.
“She was brilliant company and she was very proudly working class. To be there doing your own thing, being a separated woman, openly living with another man, (he was a yodelling comedian in workingmen's clubs) – you have to give it to her.”
Julie explains that bringing the show together has been quite a process – but one that she’s loved. With a background in improvisation, making-up stories and characters – and then playing them across different periods and time zones – Fringe audiences will get present-day Julie Flower researching grandma – and then a childhood Flower in the shop helping out.
While I take an involuntary moment and try to wander back to Yorkshire in the 1980s, Julie produces a pristine WHSmith plastic carrier bag of the period, from her prop store. Instantly transported and only able to utter ‘Gosh’ – she laughs and explains that the bag always elicits that type of reaction. Without giving too much away – there are going to be moments in the show that will stop Fringers in their tracks.
“What I'm loving is just the way that individual people are coming up when they’ve seen the show and saying ‘ooh that made me think about the relationship I had with my grandma’ – or ‘I love the nostalgia. It's taking me straight back to that time in my life…’ It is a comedy, but it is poignant too and I've had quite a lot of people with tears in their eyes at the end, because we explore what objects mean to people and this idea of clothes having their own histories, especially in a second-hand shop, it's like it's full of. people's stories.”
Following what is sure to be a sell-out Fringe run, Julie hopes to bring her show ‘home’ to Sheffield before Christmas. When Grandma’s Shop does open for business in South Yorkshire, there’s bound to be a massive outpouring of love and nostalgia for this remarkable woman, who clearly touched the lives of so many.
And there might well be an addendum required following Edinburgh. Julie: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if something happened like cool musicians at the time remembered they had popped in? If Jarvis Cocker's reading, I, I'd love it if he said: ‘You know what, she dressed me!’ Because I know he went to second-hand shops at the time.
“Sheffield was such a hot bed for not just counterculture, but for creativity, and still is. So, the musicians who started out in Sheffield, there's got to be some links there that we need to find out about.”
Hilda passed away in 2007, but is about to enjoy an extraordinary Scots summer, thanks to her extremely talented Granddaughter.
If you can’t make it to one of the shows, you can still be a part of the experience, by listening here to our fantastic Sheffield Playlist, exclusively curated for us by Julie:
'Grandma’s Shop’ is at the Gilded Balloon, CommercialStreet, Edinburgh, EH6 6JA
4 – 26 Aug (not 12), 12.20 – 13.20
Previews 31 July – 2 Aug: £8
Sat – Sun £11
Mon – Fri £10
Tickets/Info: gildedballoon.co.uk/0131 622 6552
