We borrowed £500, bought some stock from Traidcraft and made some shelves to put it on. We supplemented the stock by buying some essentials from the cash & carry and eventually started buying bulk wholefoods from Suma and organic vegetables from Wheelbarrow Foods in Barton. The back bedroom shop became well used and demand seemed good enough for us to develop further. When the house next door to the creche on Wellsted St went up for sale it seemed a logical progression and one of the directors of Peeps secured a mortgage and moved in in September 1991. We began by knocking a doorway through to the cr�che next door and moved the shop into the front room. In May 1992 the only remaining shop/off licence on Wellsted Street closed.

Giroscope by that time had progressed to a relatively secure financial position, they owned around 15 properties and were able to purchase the shop and rent it back to us at a favourable rate. We had to renovate the shop quite substantially and managed to acquire a grant towards some of the work. We closed the shop in the August of that year, spent around £20,000 on renovations and finally reopened on 17th March 1993 as 'Peeps'. The intention remained fairly consistent, healthy vegetarian foods supplemented by convenience foods that were as ethically traded as possible. We began manufacturing our own veggie burgers and developed an outside catering side to the business, running a catering trailer in Pearson Park. We eventually got Soil Association Certification and began to offer local deliveries of organic veg in our electric milk float (donated by Northern Foods).

The outside catering developed further when we took on the organising of the catering facilities at the Rainbow Festival (an annual local event that raised money for environmental groups and concerns). We also collected recyclable materials from a range of like-minded organisations and Giroscope tenants, and joined the City Council' 'Green CrusadeÕ' by siting a series of recycling bins alongside the shop. Peeps was a community shop in an area of West Hull that had begun to suffer due to a low demand for housing, many people moved away from the area as they became relatively more prosperous. The high turnover of inhabitants on benefits and unscrupulous landlords leaving properties unmaintained also fed the cycle of social problems. We were the only shop on the street, an off-licence open from 8am till 10pm seven days a week. The daily working life was often difficult; continual thefts, robberies, assaults, company vehicle damage; it sometimes seemed futile and soul destroying; custom was predominantly confectionary and off licence sales.

It all sounds quite depressing but a corner shop has to endure many things to survive; it becomes a focal point in the community; we saw it as a way to introduce new ideas of healthy eating, recycling, organic veg deliveries etc, unfortunately our viability was decided by cashflow not ethics. Many of the original directors eventually moved on and the running of the shop became too all consuming for too few people, drawing away from the new opportunities that we had developed; poor people will nearly always purchase according to price rather than ethics, we couldn't compete with the Nettos' and AldisÕ, and the promise of an Asda at the end of Hessle Road did little to enliven our spirits. So it was that in 1998 'Peeps' changed hands to be run by another workers co-operative and Arthur Street Trading Company was born into one of the new workshops that Giroscope had rebuilt at the rear of 23 Arthur Street.