To let: Bijou commercial premises with useful windows. Apply: Still, Here & Gloating, sole agents.

Taylor & Tester has closed down. I suppose someone had to go – I mean, all those estate agents and so little garden-grabbing to go round…

Still, T&T was one of the town's oldest house-selling businesses (as in, they pre-date my arrival in Sevenoaks which makes them pretty much a heritage site), so I'm sad it's their shop-front that's empty.

The space above the windows isn't empty, though. Where the Taylor & Tester board used to be, the wooden base now shows the faint outlines of an old name. It says The Bun Box.

The Bun Box? What on earth was that? I presume it was some kind of cake shop? Or possibly a retailer of pet rabbits, or a boutique for vintage hairstyles?

I'm going with the cake shop idea, until Bob Ogley tells me otherwise.

It's a bit unsettling to learn that something familiar once had a different kind of life. (Like finding 'Consuela' tattooed on your father's bottom. Your mother's name is Janice.)

It makes you wonder what you'd find if you ripped off a shop sign or two to check for a racy past.

There used to be a betting shop at the top of South Park. It's a tanning parlour at the moment. Nowadays, pale women slip in and come out looking pink; back then, pink-faced men slipped in, and came out looking pale, which makes for a satisfying symmetry, no?

Round the corner, the sandwich bar was, until recently, Lime Tree Studios, which wasn't racy at all, unless things happened in the darkroom that they didn't mention on the price list.

No, the fascination of Lime Tree Studios was the window display of their best work, which often featured people you knew.

My goodness, you'd think, admiring a family group artfully arranged around a sofa, Elspeth's got new terracotta curtains. Or the soft-focus wedding shots, where you happened to know that the bride and groom came back from honeymoon on separate planes and hadn't spoken since.

The gift shop next door used to be a lingerie boutique, which was mildly racy on account of being on a busy road and everyone being able to see exactly what kind of underwear you were thinking of acquiring. If there was a traffic jam on the London Road, there would be time for a truck driver to run his eyes over your selection and offer silent but animated feedback.

I sometimes wonder if people in the High Street key-cutting shop ever get a strange whiff of tobacco and wonder if it's the first sign of brain disease.

Rest assured, chaps, it's just a memory of the place being a fag-and-baccy seller. There's probably some old stock stuck in the floorboards.

And someone was in Taylor & Tester today, measuring up.

Perhaps The Bun Box is back.