17 Bridge Street
The business started life at 120 Marygate in rooms behind a plumber’s shop, before moving above the Universal Building Society in Hide Hill. However, 17 Bridge Street, its home from 1953 to 2012, is the address most associated with the Photo Centre.
Customers would enter directly into the ground floor shop where cameras, equipment and film were sold. A staircase at the rear led to a large room on the first floor.
This became the studio where generations of townspeople and visitors had their portraits taken for family albums and passports. News stories were written and dispatched from the office on the top floor, where there was also a darkroom and negative store. A second darkroom was in the cellar.
In the late 1960s, 17 Bridge Street was renamed ‘the Photo Centre’, a title that expressed the numerous operations of the business and marked a shift away from photojournalism into more commercial work.
Over the years the Photo Centre staff included photographers, shop assistants, telephonists and reporters. In addition to David and Ian Smith, David’s younger son David Jr, his daughter Ailsa and wife Charlotte also worked there. From the early 1980s, Ian’s wife Ellen was a mainstay of the business.