Menu Close

Episode Five: Where Food Buying is Most Satisfactory

I hope you enjoyed the Bennett’s podcast episode. You might also appreciate the brief post I wrote to celebrate a photo shared with me by Marc Shaw. I thought I would share today two more selections of photos about the store, its people, and its space. (To see a photo bigger, double click, and then double click again.) The first group of photos were provided by Isobel Wallace Gordon, whose mother was Nellie Bennett, George and Cecil’s sister and the daughter of Hugh and Ann Jane. Thank you so much for sharing these, Isobel!

And now, some more recent photos, from the tail end of Bennett’s/No Frills. The first three (provided by Jocelyn Purdy, the artist facilitator of the project) are Susan Anderson’s photos of people’s shopping carts that were part of a “KISS” project sponsored by the Kingston Arts Council in 2003. The second three (courtesy of Wendy Luella Perkins) show the FRILL Garden (2004-2009) on Charles Street land just behind the Bennett’s warehouse. Carone Beaucage started this garden and many grew in it and ate from it until Loblaws shut it down.

As you heard in the podcast, the Bennett’s land remains empty after the closure of No Frills. May we hope that if the land is built on, it will be useful and meaningful to the neighbourhood, as Bennett’s clearly was.

— Laura Murray