Lendons Model Shop has stood the test of time in Cardiff and is also one of the oldest of it’s kind in the UK
The high street is in a near-constant state of change. Over the course of just a few years, familiar shops can disappear, replaced by new businesses and new identities. For many towns, that shift has left once-recognisable streets feeling altered beyond recognition. Yet despite the pressures of rising rents and the growth of online shopping, some independent retailers continue to endure. On Cardiff’s high street, one such presence is Lendons – a shop that has weathered change and remains firmly part of the city’s commercial landscape.
Tucked away on Fidlas Road in Llanishen, Lendons has traded from the same street since 1944. Established in the mid-1940s, it is often cited as being among the oldest surviving model shops in the UK, although tracing a definitive national history of such businesses is not straightforward. It opened just a few years after The Model Shop in Northampton, founded in 1937 and widely regarded as the country’s oldest, placing Lendons firmly among a small group of long-standing specialists still operating today.
For those unfamiliar with what lies behind its modest frontage, owner Rob Matthews offers a straightforward explanation. “It’s pretty much, as it says on the tin,” he says. “A model shop. We sell pretty much everything to do with modelling – apart from radio control.” Inside, every nook and cranny is filled. Shelves are lined with model cars, trains and planes, alongside paints, brushes, tools, materials and scenery supplies, catering to everyone from casual hobbyists to dedicated enthusiasts.
Despite its longevity, much of Lendons’ early story is pieced together rather than carefully archived. “It started in 1944 as a cycle shop,” Rob explains. “At some point it became a model shop, but we don’t know exactly when that happened.”
What is known is that Rob’s grandparents, James Lendon and his wife May, opened the business as the Second World War was coming to an end. Keen cyclists themselves, the couple opened a bicycle repair shop to serve the growing community in north Cardiff, meeting a practical need at a time when resources were scarce and bikes were a vital form of transport.
As the business grew, James Lendon began to devote more space to his personal interest in model trains, gradually stocking parts and kits for other enthusiasts. Lendons is thought to have been the first shop in Cardiff to sell Airfix kits, allowing children to recreate the aircraft they had seen flying overhead during the war years. By 1960, after acquiring the neighbouring premises on Fidlas Road, the range of models on offer expanded significantly, helping to cement the shop’s reputation among local hobbyists.
In 1972, James and May sold the business to local businessman Campbell James, during which time it traded as James & Lendon. Ownership returned to the family in 1990, when Rob’s parents, Dave and Jo Matthews, bought the shop back and ran it for the next 17 years. In 2007, they handed the reins to Rob, who has been running Lendons singlehandedly ever since.
For Rob, the shop has always been part of his life. He remembers popping in regularly while growing up, particularly after his family moved into his grandparents’ former house. “When I turned 11, we moved to what was my grandparents’ house, because my granddad had died in 1974,” he recalls. “So this shop was almost next door to where I lived while I was a teenager.”
In fact, taking over Lendons was never on Rob’s radar. “I left school and got a job, did an apprenticeship on the railway, worked there for a few years,” he explains. “I left the railway, went self-employed, was doing computers, doing mobile computer repairs, and then I opened a computer shop. I’m only here now because there’s no money in computers anymore.”
His parents were keen to retire, and the decision fell into place almost by circumstance. “It was a choice between keeping the computer shop going, going to work somewhere else, or taking over a business that was well established and didn’t take any effort,” Rob recalls. “I literally closed the computer shop, and then on the Friday and on the Monday I walked into the model shop and just carried on as if I’d been there forever. Which would have been silly not to have done.”
19 years on, Rob says it still feels like yesterday since he took over the business. Doing ten hour shifts most days, his parents are never far away. His 90-year-old father and his mother regularly pop in to lend a hand, helping with customers and keeping the shop in order while Rob deals with admin and sends out orders.
“He will just do whatever needs doing,” Rob says of his father. “If I’m out the back, he’ll serve customers, do stock checks, order things.” His mother, meanwhile, keeps the place organised. “I’m a typical bloke – I won’t get the vacuum cleaner out,” he laughs. “The place will turn into a mess, then my mum will come in about one o’clock, start cleaning, get the vacuum cleaner out and make sure everything’s tidy. I could walk past a mess a thousand times and just ignore it.”
For Rob, there is no single formula for surviving an evolving high street. Instead, he credits the shop’s longevity to its customers. “We wouldn’t be here without them,” he says bluntly.
“We have hundreds of regulars and it’s definitely a mix, but it does lean towards the older, retired generation – which you expect. A lot of them bring their grandkids in though, so hopefully you start to see a new generation moving into place and getting interested.”
That generational shift, however, is not without its challenges. “It is so difficult with all the computer games, phones and so on,” Rob adds. “It’s a completely different world to what it was like when I was a kid.”
Alongside its loyal customer base, Lendons has also had to modernise in order to survive. Rob recalls building the shop’s first website in the early 2000s, a move initially met with scepticism. “I wrote my parents a website in 2002, I think it was, and they were like, ‘I don’t need a website,’” he says. “I put maybe 50 products on there.”
That hesitation quickly faded. “A couple of months later, someone from America rang the shop and said, ‘You’ve got this locomotive on your website – can I buy it?’ From that moment on, my parents were like, ‘This website is a good thing.’ It was completely alien to them at first.”
Behind the scenes, however, running a specialist shop of Lendons’ scale is far from straightforward. With tens of thousands of individual products across multiple hobbies, stock management is a constant balancing act – one that relies far more on experience than automation.
“The problem is, if you look on my website it says there are about 38,000 products,” Rob says. “You can’t concentrate on just one thing. If you focus on railway, then the kits start running out. If you focus on kits, then another part of the shop gets neglected. You just can’t keep everything in stock.
“A lot of the stuff doesn’t have barcodes on it either, so it’s not like a supermarket where the computer automatically reorders things. I physically have to stand there and look at the stock and think, right – have I got one of these? No, order that. Have I got one of these? Yes, fine. You can spend hours working out an order, and then the next customer comes in and asks for something completely different that you didn’t order.
“It doesn’t matter what you bring in – the customer always wants something else.”
Despite the challenges, Rob says there is no doubt he enjoys the work. “It keeps me busy, it keeps me active,” he says. But it is the quieter moments – uncovering small traces of the shop’s past – that he finds most rewarding.
“Our drawers are filled with all sorts,” Rob explains. “I’ve got a tube of glue that’s actually branded Lendons. Back then you must have been able to do that – the same way you can get pens, mugs or T-shirts printed now. This was glue for building kits, and it’s completely brand new. It’s never been opened. Proper Airfix-type glue.”
For Rob, objects like that offer a tangible link to the shop’s earlier years – and a sign of the shop’s longevity.
At a time when many independent shops have disappeared from the high street, Lendons continues much as it always has. Its longevity owes less to grand reinvention than to steady adaptation, practical decisions and a loyal customer base that has sustained the business across decades.