Late 20th Century: A Family Enterprise and Urban Renewal

The early 1980s marked a turning point. At that time, the Abbott family, led by Charles “Charlie” Abbott - entered the scene and would eventually breathe new life into these streets.

Charlie Abbott founded Taylor’s Screen Print in 1970, establishing a growing signwriting and screen-printing business. Initially, Taylor’s operated from smaller premises elsewhere in the city, where signs were hand-drawn and manufactured.

As the business expanded and became more automated (winning big contracts, such as printing signage for the rapidly growing Iceland Foods chain), Charlie sought a large, centralized space.

Gildart Street’s empty warehouse (the old Mr Max building) caught his eye.

Around 1979, Charlie negotiated a lease for the Gildart Street premises – effectively saving it from dereliction. This is where he started to consolidate his printing operations. After a successful few years, Taylor’s Screen Print had outgrown even that building, and Charlie looked to take over next door.

The adjacent Kempston Street warehouse (ex-Harris Toys) was ideal but had no clear owner in residence (the collapse of Harris’s had left it padlocked and idle). Charlie famously knocked the padlock off the door to inspect the building, then tracked down the last known tenant (G. Day & Co.) to discover that the title had reverted to the Crown via the Duchy of Lancaster. Through some persistence, he dealt with the Duchy – the legal steward of ownerless properties, and managed to purchase the Kempston Street building in 1984.

It was a derelict shell at that point, filled with debris and outdated machinery. The Abbotts cleared out tons of old stock (with even the Fire Brigade intervening when they tried to burn rubbish on site!). They also made structural improvements: the floor levels between the Gildart and Kempston sides were mismatched by about 1 meter, so they re-engineered a connection; an unstable wooden mezzanine was replaced with a reinforced concrete floor to support heavy screen-printing equipment. By the mid-1980s, Charlie Abbott had effectively merged the Gildart and Kempston Street sites into one large complex, which became the headquarters of Taylor’s Screen Print. For the first time in decades, the old buildings were fully utilised and buzzing with activity – not as dwellings or warehouses for goods as once before, but as an automated printworks.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the Abbott family’s enterprise kept these buildings alive. Taylor’s Screen Print thrived through the ’80s, riding the boom of retail graphics and signage (notably producing for Iceland Foods’ expansion from 2 stores to 800 stores, which was a key contract that fuelled the company’s growth). The once-neglected corner of Gildart, Kempston, and Constance Street became a hive of production, employing local workers and interacting with other businesses in the area.

While many surrounding structures remained underused, or were demolished for surface parking, the Taylor’s complex stood out as a success story of adaptive reuse.

The streets themselves were quiet – by this time, almost no one lived on Gildart or Constance Street, – but just trucks and vans frequented the area for deliveries and pick-ups. The usage of the streets had thus evolved: Kempston Street and Gildart Street in the late 20th century were predominantly industrial/commercial, home to printers, wholesalers, and manufacturers, with virtually no residential presence.

The fabric of the Victorian slum had been replaced by brick warehouses, and now those warehouses were being repurposed in modern ways.