Jubilee celebrations are in full flow across Sheldon Bosley Knight (SBK). Staff have been pulling out all the stops to adorn their offices with flags, bunting, flowers, photos of property in the area from the 1950s and royal memorabilia in anticipation of this weekend’s festivities.
In Kineton, 70 homes and businesses have been creating special window displays with each taking on one year of the Queen’s reign. The SBK office has been given 1952, the year Queen Elizabeth II took the throne.
Manager Sara Jordan and her team have been going down memory  lane to decorate the window with SBK sales leaflets and photos of the village from the 1950s, flags and bunting.
When the Queen ascended the throne on February 6, 1952, our business was 108 years old and we were known as Kibler Morgan & Son (the name Sheldon Bosley Knight came later), with offices in Stratford and Shipston.
At the time, average house prices in the UK were just under £2,000* – the equivalent of £56,000 in today’s money. Many still had outside toilets and coal stores as electricity was expensive, including one we sold at auction on February 8, 1952.
Our archives show Ingon Cottage, Ingon Lane, Stratford was listed as being a “well situated, small detached freehold country residence”.
The three-bedroom cottage featured a pantry, larder and dairy with an outside pail closet (toilet) and coal house. It also boasted “mains water supply” and “electricity”! How times have changed.
In the seven decades the Queen has been on the throne, houses have shot up in price and at an average of well over £300,000, they are more than 130 times higher than they were 70 years ago.
SBK has also seen significant growth and now has 12 offices across four counties with 100 staff. We will be celebrating our 180^th anniversary in two years’ time.
So, from all of us at SBK, we’d like to wish Her Majesty The Queen a happy platinum jubilee!
*figures from Nationwide Building Society