Trade NamesA seaside shop in Bangor has changed tack a few times to meet the demands of the market, writes Rose Doyle

Bangor looks a treat early on a sunny morning, rooftops and the white-painted façades of Edwardian terraces all touched up golden, boat masts in the marina nudging in the day, Belfast Lough glittering blue with the promise of fishing and sailing.

Bangor, as those who know it will tell you, has always fulfilled its promise of showing the visitor a good time. The marina and latter-day sophistication are but the continuation of a long and noble tradition of welcome, of a time when Bangor was the weekend outing of choice for the seaside seeking hordes from Belfast and such.

Not that the sea and sand and easy pace was all spent on visitors - Bangorites have always been first among those who have taken pride and joy in their own advantages. But quietly.

There's few more appreciative than David McCullough, second generation of a family which opened a hardware shop on Bridge Street, overlooking sea and sand, in 1961. Today's McCullough's of Bangor is still in the same place, specialising now in a wide range of prams and nursery needs. It's larger too, having taken over next door and opened the Regency Gift House where china, glassware and jewellery are the thing.

Views of sea and sand and the Pickie Pool of swimming lore and legend have disappeared with time and development. David McCullough, a gently humorous storyteller, tells how it was, and is.

John and Gwen (nee McKinney) McCullough were from Lurgan and moving to Bangor was a "big thing at the time" their son says. "My grandfather had an Irish linen factory in Lurgan but it wasn't my father's thing so when he died my father sold the factory. That was just before he came to Bangor."

The McCulloughs lived over the shop on Bridge Street with their offspring - David and two younger sisters Jenny and Denise. Jenny (now Wallace) is in the business; Denise made other choices. David McCullough was born in 1958 so he's just old enough to have lived through the good, the slow and the now fast-forward times in Bangor. He's nostalgic for some of it but impatient too for promised change and development. There was a bit of a swing about Bangor in the 1960s.

"When my father started here in 1961 the emphasis was more on hardware," David says, "with extras like lampshades and such. Then we went towards toys and towards selling nursery goods, which is where we are today. There was no real planning to it, the market tended to dictate. It was a lot busier than it is now.

"We're only 20 minutes from Belfast so we'd get a lot of the Sunday school outings coming to Bangor for their day out on a Saturday.

"The Pickie Pool, a big swimming pool owned by the Pickie family, was a huge draw. It was outdoors and is long gone now. Once you got your season ticket you could spend every day in summer there.

My memories are all of the pool and fishing off the pier. There was a beach then where the marina is now. You could hire a Laird's wooden, rowing boat, clinker-built, and go out fishing with friends. We'd tend to follow the seagulls, row to a spot where there were 20 or 30 of them circling. Mackerel were a big thing, and whiting."

Barry's Amusements was the other hot spot, though the young McCulloughs weren't encouraged to go there by their parents.

"There were three piers in those days too and a coal pier which also had amusements on it though nothing on today's scale, just a big dipper and a wee train going around. The main pier was the breakwater which was where we used to fish.

There used be chip shops and two hotels along the front but they've all been flattened. There's great work being done there and it'll be nice when Queen's Parade is finished. They've been talking for 10 years about theatres, etc."

Growing up over the shop "was great. McKees Sports Shop was next door and Mencrilli's, on the other side, were famous for their ice-cream. They all lived over the shops so all the shopkeepers' children played together."

McCullough's sold lots of buckets and spades then, on account of the beach, and toys and some china. "But toys flooded into the market and were being sold everywhere so we moved to prams. We were in what was a niche market and by the late 1970s it was all prams and cots. We used send a lot down Dublin."

John McCullough's trade decisions weren't always swayed by market changes. "My father liked the china, that was his thing. He liked it and the gift side of things. We went through a period of model railways too, Hornby sets and Airfix kits. Children aren't interested in those any more."

David McCullough, as a youngster, helped in the shop on Saturdays, "and at Christmas when I would read all the annuals! In 1977 I came in full time. Dad was still here then and we worked along together. We had our differences but in general we got along. When the McKees upped and went to America my father bought that property, moved the china in there and put a hole in the wall and a wee archway through. Tourism began to pick up in Bangor in the late 1990s and Americans and Canadians tend to stop off to shop in Bangor."

That's how it is today; a rather elegant archway leading into the gift shop where Waterford and other crystal, Pilgrim jewellery, Belleek china and Hummel figures are all looked after by Jenny who, her brother says, spends a lot of time in the busy nursery end of the shop too. "Years ago the one pram would have done a whole family," he says of the good business in nursery goods, "not any more."

Not that prams are the thing - the Bugaboo (a pram which turns into a buggy) is today's vehicle of desire, made popular by sightings of it in use by the likes of actor Gwyneth Paltrow. "Everyone has to have a matching changing mat, sleeping bag, sun parasol . . . it's easier to buy a car these days than a pram!"

Bangor was relatively lucky during the years of The Troubles, David says. "We weren't hit so bad as some places. There were a couple of big bombs all right, one close to the shop. We all sort of pulled together here, Protestant and Catholic. On a day out in the Pickie Pool, when everyone was swimming together, no one knew what anyone else was, and no one really cared.

"My father retired some years ago but he still puts his head in to criticise! He and my mother moved to a house on the other side of the marina. We've another shop in Newtownards and I go over and back."

What of the McCullough future?

"I've three sons who are not at all interested," David admits, "two are in building and one's in university. Jenny has girls and they're a bit younger so you never know! But if they don't come into the business there'll be another pram shop to replace us. I'd like to be here for the next 10 years, to see the seafront development scheme come along and the whole town centre up and going again."

We don't discuss stories going around about Bangor being at the centre of Ulster's gold coast, nor the geological study which claims north Down is sitting on a mine of precious metal, nor the heralded expectations that such gold mining development could bring £20 million (€27 million) a year to Northern Ireland's economy. Without a word spoken about any of this it's clear Bangor is on the way to reclaiming its status as one of the places to be.