Janis Hughes
In the early 1970s, she was shopping in Brixton Market and was naturally drawn to a stall selling old things. She bought five jet beaded Victorian collars for 50p each and resold them to a Camden Passage shop for more than £4 each. “That’s when I realised I obviously had an eye,” says Janis, and having collected enough antique clothing she set up a stall on Portobello Road. “Then I met someone who had a shop, Sunset Boulevard, and I became a partner,” she says, “We were so popular we had to make people queue outside on Portobello Road. We made quite good money.”
On a visit home to her parents one weekend her mother took her to a rag yard she had discovered in Taunton. “They had loads of stuff and no one to buy it. I remember a beautiful pale pink ostrich feather coat,” she says wistfully. “My mother would go every week to buy clothes for me to sell.” The Portobello shop was so successful Janis and her partner opened a new shop in the antique emporium Antiquarius in the Kings Road. Sir Mick Jagger bought clothes there and other stars including Sir Elton John, Bob Geldof and Barbra Streisand were also regulars. (Like the chain store AllSaints takeover of Portobello’s Lipka's Antiques Arcade, where more than 150 traders made a living, Antiquarius is now a US chain store Anthropologie).
“I was feeling restless. There was an American shop girl there and she said ‘come over to Malibu’. I fell in love with it. I took the Greyhound bus along Route 66 from New York to LA. From there I met another lady from Ibiza.” Janis returned to the UK to tell her mother there was a change of plan and she was off to Ibiza. Days later a clothes parcel from her mother arrived for her to sell.
From Ibiza Janis hit the road again, this time heading to Australia, where she lived for nine years. Her decision to fly to Australia was partly based the romantic idea of following in the footsteps of her grandmother, who had travelled there for the 1800s Gold Rush. Settling in Adelaide, she first imported tweed from the same Scottish mill used by Chanel and later started a magazine.
After a life of adventure, Janis returned to the UK with nothing and, after a few months couch surfing with friends, went to Kensington and Chelsea council to ask if they could help her. She was given the number of the Sheppard Trust, an almshouse charity started by Elizabeth Sheppard in 1855. “Sheppard was left a lot of money and wanted to help the poor,” explains Janis. Over a twenty year period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s it bought properties in Holland Park. Three Lansdowne Walk houses were bought by the Trust in the 1950s and in the 1970s were converted into 30 flats for ‘ladies over the age of 65 and of a Christian faith, who are in need, hardship or distress’. Now, 74 year old Janis lives happily in that small community on Ladbroke Road. Janis reflects: “I have been so lucky in life.”
