What is a Civil Service Store in London?
It’s a retail outlet.[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC listening, talks: Welcome speech[YSaerTTEW443543]
What does it have to do with the civil service?
Apparently the Civil Service Stores were a department store on the corner of the Strand and Bedford Street. The shop is long closed and the building is under development. It had a connection to the Civil Service (it wasn’t just a made up name) but I don’t know the details… the clockface seems to suggest that it supplied members of the civil service, but I can’t tell you whether that’s right or whether it was funded by the civil service, or something else.
This sounds like the many “Army surplus” stores in the US. After World War II, they actually did sell surplus army and navy goods, but by the 1970s there was nothing left from the military, and now they just carry goods for camping, hunting and fishing. When I was growing up, we all slept under blankets from the navy, no longer needed, since the war was over and most of the sailors were home.
It wouldn’t be the British equivalent of the Army & Navy Stores, though, as we also had those in the UK.
In the US, they’re often also called “Army Navy stores”. The US military or their suppliers wholesaled the surplus to private retailers.
Is it a kind of General Store where different kinds of goods are available?
It doesn’t exist any more and I don’t know what it sold.