Humble Origins!

Andy Parrott and Alan Walters, partners in Waterside Garden Centre, used to be just a couple of gardening nuts. They lived in the same road in Bourne and both had allotments on the same site and were members of a local football team.

"We both had greenhouses and just grew everything we could," says Andy. "We were soon supplying the whole street with our vegetables, for example huge bags of broad beans for £1. It did start to get a bit out of hand at one time."

The pair became firm friends, and over the digging, after the game and in the pub later, their thoughts often turned to starting a business together. For Andy, 20 years a toolmaker, working at Molins in Peterborough, and Alan, a technical librarian for Fiat-Allis in Stamford, a garden centre and nursery might have seemed a long shot.

But they were fanatical about gardening, and decided that as they gained in expert knowledge, their enthusiasm would carry them through.

They started looking for land and found an old cress bed nursery about 300 yards from their present site. It had been a thriving business a quarter of a century earlier, employing 25 people. Cress was despatched across the country from Bourne station. Now it was derelict, and although several people had tried and failed to grow at the site, it was ideal for two men with ambition.

The original cress bed nursery. Waterside's home for 7 years.

"We had a Dutch-style greenhouse and started to try and grow bedding in a very amateurish way," explained Andy. "Then we used to carry it to the top of the road and sell it from the roadside. We did some landscaping too."

"Alan and I had an argument because I wanted to get people down to the greenhouse and he didn't. I won, and from April to June, we did a roaring trade."

The pair left their full time jobs in 1985 to concentrate on their business and soon got the turnover up to £70,000. But the early days were not without their pitfalls - literally. Andy arrived late one morning to find Alan pinned between a tractor and trailer that had become unhooked. On another occasion, he fell through the roof of the greenhouse. But they were undaunted. They sought help in running their business from the government agency ADAS and discovered things they had not considered before, like the importance of the right packaging.

Their first acquisition was a £190 Nuffield tractor, which they still have today for its sentimental value. Alan took control of the landscaping side while Andy concentrated on developing the retail roadside trade for their plants into a wholesale business.

Before it all began. This is the site of the bridge today. This was the first construction.

But within a few years, they yearned to expand their business into a full size garden centre. Plans for a piece of land nearer to Bourne fell through, and eventually, their present site became available, although initially they felt it was larger than they really wanted.

Buying was not without its problems, but Waterside Garden Centre officially opened for business in March 1990. Andy and Alan did much of the building work themselves, but because they could not sell their homes in Bourne, some of the plans for expansion had to be kept on ice for a while.

Extensions to the two original garden centre buildings went ahead in late 1992 with a linking area and a massive conservatory frontage, to display even more goods to the best advantage.

The centre is now a thriving place, but there were times when they felt like giving up. "It was tough at the start, with an unhelpful bank and an unhelpful economic climate," admits Andy. "It was really duck and dive for a while, even though the business was thriving, because so many other things seemed to be against us. But this is what we had wanted to do."

The bridge in construction (1988).

There were other unexpected jobs to do. Under the terms of the planning permission, they had to alter a road junction, build an entrance bridge, and get consent to use a borehole for watering the plants. These were three large expenses before they could even consider work on the centre itself.

By 1992, they had completed the garden centre to their original plans. But at the end of the year, they extended still further with the new building and the conservatory, adding offices, toilets and revamping the drainage system. "Now we have a business on a sound footing and all that heartache seems worthwhile," says Andy.

Late 1989 the two greenhouses were erected. They form the basis of the garden centre you see today.

The below is the original look of the centre when it first opened.