Advertising Sectioned: Savoy Health Food Stores (1936)

We think of vegetarianism and health food shops as by-products of the hippy and alternative cultures of the sixties and seventies, which reached their apogee in the eighties before going mainstream as part of the general cookery convention a few years later. Perhaps that explains the slight cognitive dissonance caused by discovering this advert for Savoy Health Food Stores, complete with nut roasts and rissoles, in a Nottingham paper published in 1936.

Then again, the thirties were a bit of an alternative culture test-bed in some respects. It was an era full of proto-hippy, back-to-nature ideas of the sort espoused by none other than our own David Herbert Lawrence, whose books are full of folk throwing off their clothes to go running into rainstorms with the living grass tingling under their bare feet before they got all jiggy with it.

The thirties were also the years that gave us the folk-culture eco-scouting movement of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, who gathered in woodlands wearing brightly coloured constructivist tabards to learn about nature crafts and socialism as an antidote to Baden Powell's imperialism.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1932, a mass trespass of Kinder Scout in the Derbyshire Peak District was organised by communists to protest at the closure of open countryside to Ramblers.

It was a decade full of anarchists, whether bow-tie wearing establishment types like Herbert Read or the working class groups heading off to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War in defiance of the British Government’s indifference to the cause. The thirties, in short, seems to have had rather more in common with the seventies and eighties than its reputation suggests.

The Exchange Walk address of Savoy Health Foods suggests it was probably the preserve of posh housewives from The Park rather than a prototype Mushroom- or Five Leaves Bookshop-style activist hub, presided over by a tweed-jacketed and corduroy-trousered version of Ross Bradshaw. Even if this seems like nothing more than a very remote possibility, it's an image to savour and a vision my mind, at least, doesn't seem inclined to let go of anytime soon.

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