The last ten years has seen the building in a state of severe neglect, before much needed restoration and repairs were carried out to make it suitable to be used for the Council Office. The building has been used as a polling station for several elections, for both local and national Government.

The "Wet Fish Shop"

If you look at the photograph above the Info link you will see a house which is situated next door to the Council Office / Auction Room. For many years this building was a shop which sold fresh fish and sea food and was known to Stainforth residents as "The Wet Fish Shop"
Shops such as this are sorely lacking in Stainforth and one must travel to a major supermarket, the nearest of which is Tesco at Edenthorpe, or even to Doncaster Market in order to buy fresh seafood.

"Videoworld"

The third shop in the photograph has also closed since the photograph was taken. Videoworld was a video rental store which bought-out the previous video rental store situated there.
Prior to being a video library, the premises has also been a self service launderette and before that, a supermarket.
One has to use the term "supermarket" here in it's loosest sense. This was at a time when the American idea of fast self service stores was only just being accepted by the British public. The earliest "supermarkets" were simply the same shops as before, but which now gave customers the option of trundling around the very limited floor space with a tiny shopping trolley or a wire basket. Some of the first shops in Stainforth to adopt this idea were totally unsuitable, either because of their size or because of the floor layout. I remember one store called Plumtree's, also on Station Road but now just a patch of bare ground and rubble, which had a step half way along the shop. This meant that only the lower section was used as a "supermarket", while the upper section still had the fresh and cooked meat counter that had been a traditional part of shops before the advent of the supermarket.
A fact worthy of note though is that Plumtree's and many of Stainforth's other "supermarkets" offered a home delivery service forty years ago, an idea which is only just being put into practice again by today's super-supermarkets.