ELY filmmaker Adam Giles and colleague Richard Millen have produced a film about J H Adams & Sons Ironmongers of Littleport which is set to feature on television.
Titled The Fenland Shop that Time Forgot, the programme will be televised on Sky later in the year while DVD copies of the film are available for purchase from Burrows Bookshop in Ely.
Richard said: “It’s a Pandora’s box, a unique window into the past, little has changed since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
“In the film we meet the locals who have shopped there for generations,” added Adam, “while interviewing we uncovered some remarkable history, in particular its fen skating past.”
During the late 19th Century, J H Adams & Sons was a hub for Fenland ice skating and held the franchise for the most popular ice speed skates in the world – Hagens. Organised ice skating in Britain started in The Fens, Littleport was once the centre of fen skating excellence and the National Ice Skating Association was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1879.
Through interviews with local residents and the very last owners of the shop, the filmmaking duo were able to chronicle the last days of the shop.
The film makes up one part of the Family Adams Project. To find out more, go to the project website: www.familyadamsproject.org.uk.
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