Bill Christophers stumped up £2.9k more than 50 years ago to buy a shop and set up Saracens Lantern.

With plans to soon retire, the 79-year-old has lifted the lid on how life has been with a front seat ticket to Canterbury, and how opening just one day a week can make savvy financial sense.

Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Desmond Tutu are some of the household names to have walked past or entered Mr Christophers’ distinctive shop, one of the city’s oldest.

Now, the father-of-two has revealed he will bring down the shutters this year on his establishment, known for its old-timey signage and quirk of only opening on Saturdays, as the business has taken its toll on his health.

If life had gone the way Bill planned as a youth, Saracens Lantern would not exist – he had trained to be a teacher but decided to leave the profession after a couple of years and go into antiques.

Saving money by working nights at the Kingsman's bakery in Sturry, Bill brokered a deal with the owner of number nine Borough and parted with the princely sum of £2,900, which works out at £57,328 in today’s money.

“At the time, there was a lot of cheap property going in Canterbury. There were a lot of empty shops,” explains Bill.

“I had to get the money, or the majority of the money, in hand to buy a property in cash.

“Harold Wilson [then-Prime Minister] had a ban on banks lending money other than improving machinery in a factory.

“Me getting a small mortgage from the old lady that had owned it before, it was private, so it didn't come under Wilson's rules and regulations.

“I was in the right place at the right time.”

Despite his concerns regarding his age and health, Bill is remarkably sharp and fondly recalls how he fell in love with antiques.

His mother had sent him to the greengrocers for oranges with half a crown when he was handed his precious first keepsake as change – a Queen Victoria Jubilee shilling.

Bill also remembers finding a rusty pistol while digging trenches and playing war games with his brother as a child in Headcorn, where they grew up.

The family later moved to Goudhurst into an old pub, a home which proved to be a treasure trove for an aspiring collector.

Saracens Lantern even got its name from an iron lamp bracket Bill had bought from The Saracen’s Head pub when it was demolished in 1969 to make way for a ring road.

Bill sold the freehold for the shop in 2004, with the upstairs being converted into a duplex. In exchange, he secured a 999-year lease with a peppercorn rent.

This was four years after he had decided to only open the store on Saturdays in 2000.

It was an unusual move at the time and would be unthinkable now, but Bill had a rather ingenious way of looking at it.

“When I first started, I opened six and sometimes seven days a week. I never had a holiday for the first five years that I had the shop,” he said.

“I found that you get a lot of people coming in during the course of the week, they just sort of look round and say ‘Oh, lovely stock, lovely stock, who does the dusting?’ And I got thoroughly fed up.

“I thought: ‘People go to antiques fairs and they're only on one day, sometimes two days a week, and they're at the weekend, so why shouldn't I benefit by just being open on a Saturday?’

“I found that over the first six months that I did Saturdays only, my takings had only gone down by about 20%.”

Having dedicated the majority of his life to selling antiques in Canterbury, Bill has been around to see many trends come and go while witnessing history in the making.

It paid to have a savvy mind and a can-do attitude, and he fondly remembers upcycling old furniture he found in nearby auction houses for pennies, calling it a “very lucrative business”.

“There are sort of phases when certain things are in fashion and that lasts for a certain while, and then it fades,” explains Bill.

“It's like the brown furniture, beautiful furniture, like a little Pembroke table - we could have got £200 or £300 for it 10, 20 years ago.

“Now you're lucky if you get about £50. That's out of fashion, but it will come back in at some stage.”

He remembers the day Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand went to Canterbury Cathedral to sign the Channel Tunnel agreement in 1986, and all the armed police who came with them.

There is also the memory of Desmond Tutu coming into the shop and finding an African book on “the habits of savages” – a wildly outdated attitude which sparked bouts of laughter between the pair.

But naturally, after more than half a century in Canterbury, things have not panned out entirely the way Bill hoped.

He explained how he bears some disappointment over the way the city has turned out.

There is regret the eastern bypass, which has been proposed for decades, was not built in the 1970s and calls the roads in the area “atrocious”.

He also reflects on the now-abandoned plans for a third railway station where the East and West lines meet and believes a Bluewater-type shopping centre could have been built there.

“It would have catered for a lot of people that just wanted to come to Canterbury to do their shopping and leave the city centre for the tourists to look around and for the locals to actually have places that they could go to and enjoy themselves,” suggests Bill.

“It could have been totally traffic-free.

“Canterbury’s gone downhill a lot.

“There have been so many out-of-town developments, housing estates and bits of industrial estate here, there, and everywhere.”

Regardless, it is clear to see that for 55 years, Bill has enjoyed his time as a shop owner.

After such a long time trading, it is perhaps no surprise his collection has grown rather than shrunk.

If he can find anyone to offload the stock to, he says he will do just that to help wind down the business.

Otherwise, he may pop up at village fetes to sell bits and pieces as a hobby rather than a career.

Or, he explained, it may well find its way to charities such as Demelza, as long as they can cope with the volume of items.

But what is certain is that as Saracens’ stock becomes lighter, many will feel a heavy heart to see the piece of history disappear.