Address:225 Aldborough Road South, Seven KingsIlford, IG3 8HZMap:Region:Seven Kings(Ilford)Nearest Station:Newbury ParkCategory:Curtains - Retailers & MakersTelephone:All Curtains - Retailers & MakersMost Popular Curtains - Retailers & MakersPaul Simon (0.9 miles)High Road, Chadwell Heath, RM6 4HXMontgomery Interior Fabrics (1.2 miles)High Road, Town Centre, IG1 1ASAlf Onnie (2.8 miles)High Street North, East Ham, E6 2JAAdd a PhotoSubmit a Top TipWrite a ReviewYour Business?Add more details about your business or tell us about incorrect details using these buttons.Choose Hillarys and you’ll benefit from a dedicated in-home service, which gives you the ideal opportunity to discover the perfect carpets, blinds, curtains or shutters for your décor. A Hillarys advisor will come to you, bringing our entire range along for you to browse and will be on hand to offer all sorts of style tips and practical adviceWhen autumn turns the corner into winter, the afternoons are at their darkest and the pretence that it is not almost Christmas can no longer be sustained, the thoughts of most civilized people turn to cricket.

Thanks to satellite television there is hardly a day in the calendar when those starved of the game cannot watch some form of it: England arrive in South Africa next week. In the cold and dark, all the controversies and problems with the modern game count for little compared with the sunlight it brings into the lives of those who love cricket. • WG Grace: Reflections on a champion We think back, too: not just to last summer, but to countless summers before that, with their memories not merely of fine cricket, but of the social activities that are connected with the game. A charming book, just published in time for Christmas, reminds us why cricket will always be more than just a game. In The Old Stagers: Canterbury, Cricket and Theatricals (OS Publishing, £20), Richard Ritchie presents the history of the oldest continually functioning amateur dramatics society in the world, and one linked from its birth with the game. For more than 170 years whenever there has been cricket in Canterbury in early August, so too has this society provided entertainment in the evenings.

Canterbury Cricket Week was founded in 1842, and so were the Old Stagers. By that point the famous lime tree at the St Lawrence Ground, which stood just inside the boundary, already flourished, planted at the time of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. It came down in 2005, thanks to disease and a gale force wind. Despite some buffeting to the traditional structure of county cricket, Canterbury week just about still exists, even if once the fixture list was so messed about that the plays had to be performed at an entirely different time from the cricket. The early Old Stagers included some of the finest amateur cricketers of the time. After All England played Kent in a match in Canterbury in 1841, some MCC members, staying at the Fountain Hotel, were all “delighted with the Town, the Cathedral, the Ground, the Company, and the accommodation offered”, but “felt that some evening amusements were required to enliven the visitors”. A clergyman, cricketer and local landowner, John Baker, suggested “theatricals”.

The following year some amateurs and cricket lovers, mainly men who had played and acted together at Cambridge University, resolved to put on a show: and on 1 August 1842, the curtain rose on “the first performance of the Canterbury Amateurs”. curtains csfd• Cricket's enemy within is killing the game Mr Ritchie, long a distinguished amateur actor himself but who now, having retired from the oil industry, acts professionally, has been manager of the Old Stagers for 20 years and associated with the society since 1968. merete curtains purpleHe observes that both the Canterbury Cricket Week and the troupe “owe their existence largely to the same people, the linchpins of the amateur worlds of Victorian cricket and ‘theatricals’.” square quilted grommet top 95-inch curtain pair

It was not least down to the enthusiasm of John Baker, who had made a cricket ground on his land near the town in the 1830s, that high-quality teams were attracted to Canterbury, in the days of Fuller Pilch, Nicholas Felix and the Mynns. canterbury floral red & cream 66x72 pencil pleat lined curtainsUntil a formal County Championship was established, All England XIs of professionals and “shamateurs” – of whom WG  Grace would become the most conspicuous – would come down to play Kent, and draw huge crowds to Canterbury. thermalogic weathermate curtains - 84 tab-top insulatedThe leading amateur club I Zingari had a close association with the cricket festival. tribeca faux silk grommet curtains

Frederick Ponsonby, one of the founders of IZ, was also a founder of the Old Stagers, and would become 6th Earl of Bessborough. His brother Spencer, who played for MCC, Surrey and Middlesex, was another “theatrical”, and they tempted on to the stage Alfred Mynn, a gentleman farmer who grew hops near Goudhurst and who was, by common consent, the greatest cricketer in England until Grace came along. java grommet velvet blackout curtain panelAs Mr Ritchie notes, in the 1840s cricket and the stage had much in common. Gifted amateurs could flourish in either, but professionalism was advancing in both. As cricket became a game longer in form, with matches two innings a side and lasting three days, even some of the well-to-do types who had learned the game at public schools and joined elite clubs found it harder to spare the time. Within a few decades the Old Stagers had become an integral part of the Cricket Week at Canterbury, and their highly-accomplished performances had helped make it a social occasion considered the next desirable destination after the end of the London season in late July.

But the days when cricketers of sufficient standard to play in the week also trod the boards were effectively over. Yet the link between these two recreations, born together, continued, and just about survives, even though cricket is now ruthlessly professional and the Old Stagers have long since enlisted professional actresses to boost their standard. Mr Ritchie argues that such a partnership could only happen in England, and of course he is right. And, like so much to do with cricket, it says much about England. Fifteen years ago Bill Deedes, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and a Man of Kent, wrote in it that during August “while the Second World War was on, I consoled myself by thinking that Canterbury Cricket Week, founded in 1842 with its tents and famous lime tree, unchanging in a changing world, was the sort of thing I was in business to preserve.” One tent would be occupied by the Old Stagers. The lime tree has been re-planted; but things now are less unchanging than in Bill’s day.

A week’s cricket no longer neatly accommodates two three-day matches, since there no longer are three-day matches. Until last season there was no guarantee of a “traditional” cricket week at all: but complaints from members and the public ensured that in 2015 a four-day match was preceded and followed by a one-day game. However, as Mr Ritchie says at the end of his charming book, the future of unsubsidised theatre in Britain is now uncertain: one way or another, the ancient partnership of the Canterbury Week is not inevitable. Canterbury, which along with Scarborough and Cheltenham remains one of the most renowned of cricket weeks is, like them, a rare survivor of the art of taking cricket, and all the social whirl that goes with it, out to the people. Colin Cowdrey, when President of Kent at the turn of the century, noted that Kent no longer played on grounds where he had turned out in the early 1950s, such as Folkestone, Dover, Gravesend, Gillingham, Dartford and Blackheath. Since 2005 no games have been played at Maidstone – though Kent did play at Beckenham last year, as well as at Tunbridge Wells and Canterbury.