A new exhibition is set to take visitors on a trip down memory lane into the Nicholsons Centre’s past.

The long-standing centre has served the community for decades with a range of shops, cafés and restaurants.

Over the years, the centre has changed and adapted to welcome new traders and host popular events in the Maidenhead calendar, including the Maidenhead Town Show and the Maidenhead Pancake Race.

However, after its redevelopment was approved, the centre is set to permanently close its doors on Tuesday, June 9.

To highlight the site’s rich history and give people an opportunity to reminisce and share their memories, Maidenhead Heritage Centre and the Craft Coop have teamed up to put on a public exhibition to showcase the history of the site and the centre over the years.

The exhibition, entitled Before and After Nicholsons, is set to open to the public this Saturday in the unit opposite the former Thai Thai restaurant and will run until early June.

Paul Seddon, one of the honorary curators of Maidenhead Heritage Centre, said: “It’s looking at the history of that area from the coaching days and the growth of the inns and stabling and so on along Maidenhead High Street, which is what really first established Maidenhead as a recognisable town.

“The development of Nicholson’s Brewery, which came to dominate the brewing industry after the coaching age, really, was when Maidenhead was growing as a town, after the arrival of the railway.


“The sections of the exhibition are the coaching era, the brewery, what we’re calling ‘the lost streets’.

“Because these are the streets that got swept away in the 1960s to make way for the shopping centre, and then the history of the shopping centre itself.”

Each section will also be accompanied by a short video featuring visuals with captions to explain the history.

“We’re basically presenting the story of these phases of the development of the area through to the present day,” he added.

The Nicholsons Centre was opened in phases.

“There was no grand opening for the very first phase, which was not a covered shopping mall of the kind that it became,” Paul explained.

As part of the exhibition, a quilt sewn together by the Craft Coop on the theme of ‘Our Maidenhead’, which has been hanging in the Heritage Centre, will also be on display.

Visitors will also get to see objects from the days of the Nicholson’s Brewery.

“I think it’s something that people in Maidenhead and around will realise they miss when it’s gone.

“There will be quite an empty hole while the re-development is going on and it’s good that people will have had an opportunity to reflect on why it came to be there, what it’s been and how much social memory and family memory and friends groups memory is located in what was there.

“There’s plenty of material there for people to see and think about and reflect.”

The team are also hoping the exhibition will bring people into the Nicholsons Centre over the coming weeks, Paul added.

“There are plenty of shops still open there and charity activities still going [on] there,” he said.

“They would like to see as many people still coming into [the] Nicholsons Centre right up to the close.”

The exhibition will be open from 11am to 4.30pm Tuesdays to Sundays.