Radio Rentals and Lunn Poly  1.0.0

Famous for having huge front windows, these two defunct store were once commonplace in the commercial centres of British towns:-

1. Radio Rentals - Huge numbers of British citizens used to rent their TV not own it, including my parents.  Why?  Early TV sets were not only expensive, but also unreliable, however, if one rented it from Radio Rentals, a family were assured a swift visit by a trained professional who knew how to mend a broken TV set.  Curiously, Radio Rentals left a truly bizarre legacy behind, it is the reason why VCRs all ran on the VHS system not the superior Betamax.  Faced with a better competitor, the inventors of VHS gave a deal of a lifetime to Radio Rentals, resulting in the company offering the public a free VHS machine if your rented your TV from them.  With only three/four channels to choose from at the time in the UK, this became an instant hit, and it must have seemed like money falling ut the sky for Radio Rentals.  By the  end of the 1970's, when barely 2% of Americans owned a VCR machine,  over 60% of all VCRs in the world were owned by British households, and they were, of course, all VHS machines.  So, by 1980, all the studios concentrated all releases on the taste of the British public not the American, and everything was put ut on VHS.

2. Lunn Poly, the Travel Store - The explosion in the cheap package tours to Spain in the 1970s, brought also a similar growth in travel agents, and Lunn Poly rode the wave better than almost any others.  Despite only having built up its chain to a meagre 65 stores by 1965, about 100 years after it was founded by a European lay preacher, it boasted 509 branches countrywide by the mid 1980s.  Although taken over by the group owning Thomson Air Tours, sadly, the decision wa taken to scrap the brand and its powerful white writing on a scarlet field is now noteworthy for its absence from most British town shopping centres.

The brickwork and its colour is based on those in Pimlico in London while the basic design of the building is inspired by those in the Latimer Road area of Kilburn.