Staff at a Bury St Edmunds home and gift shop are celebrating after their window display was judged to be the most festive in town.

 

It’s the second year running that LOFT & SPIRES at 61 Cornhill has won the annual competition – and the first time in the ten years it’s been established that any business has won it more than once.

 

A different judge is invited to choose the winner each year in the competition organised by Our Bury St Edmunds, which runs the Business Improvement District (BID). This year the task fell to the Mayor of St Edmundsbury Councillor Margaret Marks who also chose two runners up. They were another previous winner and runner up last year, florist Tudor Rose in Hatter Street and Bury Sewing & Knitting in St Johns Street. Councillor Marks revealed that choosing a winner had been much harder than she’d anticipated when she accepted the role of judge. She said: “It was an enormously difficult challenge, especially finally choosing between LOFT & SPIRES and Tudor Rose. I must have walked past them at least a dozen times trying to make up my mind but in the end I thought LOFT & SPIRES’ window display was very eye catching, attractive and topical, with all the elements to amuse and engage all ages. But there were at least half a dozen more windows that really deserved to be highly commended too.”

 

The winning window shows Father Christmas sitting in an armchair in front of a traditionally decorated fireplace, surrounded by gifts and with stockings hanging up for his reindeer. Romy Abraham who owns LOFT & SPIRES said: “I’m so proud of my fabulous team, Lizzy Hall, Alice Garwood and Frances Maulkerson who once again worked very hard to create this display and for it to be judged the winning window again. A lot of painting and making went into the main fireplace prop, but I think one of the most beautiful features is the fantastic fireplace garland created by our in house and highly talented florist – Lizzy Hall, who was also responsible for our rather plump Santa. One of the most unfortunate features of the initial window display was down to me with my glue gunning of greenery on top of carrots filling the reindeer stockings. They all turned black and had to be removed post haste!“ It’s a great honour to be the first business in the town centre to win this award twice and we will be putting in all our efforts to win it again in 2019 so watch this space!”

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LOFT & SPIRES will now hold the prestigious Our Bury St Edmunds shield for another year. It was presented this morning by the organisation’s Chief Executive Mark Cordell and The Mayor. Mark commented: “I’m not surprised that Councillor Marks found it such a difficult task and I thank her for putting so much time into it. LOFT & SPIRES have once again produced a stunning festive window but all the businesses in Bury St Edmunds make a realeffort with their windows and the competition gets stronger every year. As an organisation we also run free window dressing courses to our member businesses because we know this is something that is very important to them all year round.”