Saturday Morning DIY: The Era of FADS Homecare

Seeing that classic high street shopfront instantly brings back the unique, slightly chemical smell of wallpaper paste, fresh vinyl rolls, and oil-based gloss paint. For anyone planning a bit of home improvement in the 1970s or 1980s, FADS ("The Paint ’n’ Paper People") was the absolute epicenter of the weekend DIY rush.

Long before the massive, out-of-town retail warehouse parks took over the market, decorating your home meant heading down to the local high street to see what was new in the windows.

The Ritual of the Pattern Book

A trip to FADS wasn't a quick in-and-out affair. It was a serious, family-wide decision-making process:

• The Trestle Tables: The back of the shop always featured heavy wooden counters or trestles loaded with massive, bound wallpaper pattern books. Families would crowd around them, flipping through textured anaglypta, bold woodchip, or the latest avant-garde geometric patterns.
• The Samples: Once you settled on a design, the clerk would pull a roll from the floor-to-ceiling racks behind the counter. If you were smart, you’d tear off a small sample piece to take home and pin to the wall, just to see how the pattern looked under the light of your own living room.
• The Extras: You couldn't leave without a plastic tub of Solvite paste, a plumb line to make sure your first drop was straight, and a bag of those distinct, bristle-shedding paintbrushes that always left a stray hair or two permanently dried into your skirting boards.

A Perfectly Preserved Streetscape

The photo captures the high street exactly as it used to be—intimate, localized, and full of character. Look at the shops flanking FADS:

• On the Left: A commercial stationer proudly displaying a blue Philips sign in the window, back when getting typewriter ribbons, carbon paper, or ledger books required a dedicated trip to a specialist.
• On the Right: "FAITH," a traditional toy and pram shop. The window is packed to the brim with metal pram frames, dolls, and boxed games—the kind of shop where kids would press their noses against the glass for twenty minutes while their parents were inside debating the merits of woodchip wallpaper next door.
• The Car: The corner of that classic, angular saloon car in the foreground perfectly dates the era, complete with its chrome trim and the tax disc tucked into the corner of the windscreen.

FADS was a true staple of a vanished high street culture, a place that provided the raw materials for a million DIY disasters and triumphs across Britain.