From Phil Magrath, Curator of Emsworth Museum, July 2023
Shelagh Standen and I continue to undertake outreach about once a month at Art Invisible held in Hewitt’s Community Hub in South Street, Emsworth. Here young folk with learning disabilities working in a design workshop are encouraged to develop new ideas and to express them in art. As a bonus cash is generated from the sale of their original artwork.
We take artefacts along with us that match an agreed theme and discuss them and the culture around them to help fire their fertile imaginations. This has been remarkably successful. One young artist, Roger Sadler, pressed the enclosed old post card into my hand offering it for the museum. Dated from around the 1950s it shows two ladies in the doorway of E.A. Stevens, greengrocer, and general stores of North Street. One of the two is Roger’s relative Mrs. Ada Smith and we were wondering if our readership can identify the other lady. E.A. Stevens currently features in the museums small ‘Self-Sufficient Emsworth’ display in the Main Room and is an excellent example of the popularity of these small outlets that oftentimes specialised in selling everything – well, almost everything.
Philip A. Magrath
Curator EMHT
