Boots: Exhibition marks 175 years on high street

Boots employees on an outing to the British Empire Exhibition in about 1924

The 175th anniversary of Boots the Chemist is being marked with an exhibition about its impact on everyday life.

In 1849, John Boot opened a store on Nottingham's Goose Gate, gaining a reputation for value for money.

The exhibition will focus on how the high street and retail have changed.

Counter Culture: 175 Years of Shopping at Boots opens at Lakeside Arts' Djanogly Gallery on Friday and will run until 21 July.

The exhibition features a training film from the early 1970s

Organisers said John Boot valued a "healthcare for all" approach, and by the time his son Jesse took sole control of the business in 1877, he had positioned it as offering traditional medicines at value prices.

The exhibition examines, they added, changing customer needs, cultural aspirations, and patterns of everyday life, and the corresponding evolution of technologies, display techniques, approaches to advertising, and architectural designs that have shaped modern shopping.

Richard Hornsey, associate professor of Modern British History at the University of Nottingham, said: "For this exhibition, we wanted to celebrate the history of Boots in a different way, by focusing on the Boots shopper.

"This is a celebration of ordinary experience and the factors that have shaped it over time."

By 1896, the Boots store on Goose Gate, Nottingham, was a powerful presence

Among the exhibits are 19th Century carboys - decorative glass storage bottles - that were commonly used by pharmacists to signal their trade to passers-by.

Also on display is a pharmacist's workbench, which shows how they would work before mass production, making up individual medicines according to each customer's needs.

The exhibition shows that Boots has sold many other things besides medicines

One particularly pervasive area is advertising, with examples from World War One - featuring characters 'Reggie Sam' and 'Betty' - and the 'Mummy says….' campaign from the 1940s.

Sophie Clapp, company archivist at Boots UK, said: "This is a wonderful way to celebrate our 175th anniversary within our local community.

"The exhibition places the Boots customer at the heart of our retail innovations and shows that our enduring position on the high street is due to the ways in which we have responded to their changing needs."

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of talks; on subjects as diverse as the Boots' 17 cosmetics brand and the company's branches in New Zealand and Fiji.