Shop that’s a cut above the rest

2:41pm Tuesday 3rd July 2007

A HAIRDRESSER'S salon in the heart of Walthamstow Village has been restored to its full glory by a local man.

Beulah Village Salon, dated back to 1862 from its last sale deeds. Today it operates as a hairdresser's as it did in the days when water for washing hair was drawn from a well in the rear garden.

Its owner, self-taught builder and restorer Donald Miller, 65, who did all the work himself, said he believes the shop could be one of the oldest in the borough to have continued to trade in its original line.

He said: "I have been saddened over the past years at witnessing the three small Victorian shops next to mine being converted into houses.

"I have explained to the planning officers that if you change these small shops into houses, how will future generations know what life was like in the old village of Walthamstow before the coming of the train and the urbanisation of Walthamstow's countryside?"

Beulah Road was one of the first streets to be built up in the 19th century section of Walthamstow Village, which was then surrounded by farmland.

According to Mr Miller, who bought the shop in 1963, it comprised three rooms, each about 12ft square, with a cattle shed in the rear garden.

The hairdressing took place in a small candlelit room, which was sandwiched between a waiting room and a washer's room, in which water used to wash hair was stored in large earthenware pots.

Nearly all the materials used in the restoration - wood for the doors, and tiles for the floor - came from his own store, amassed over the past 40 years from visiting demolition sites around London.

The doorframes were reclaimed from the Convent of the Good Shepherd at Finchley, and York Stone was bought from Charington's Coal Yard in Highams Park in the 1970s.

Mr Miller is now thinking of protecting his work with a restrictive covenant; a measure aimed at preventing it ever being turned into housing.