Around London – January 1993: Although I continued my walks around London at the end of 1992 and in January 1993 I made very few colour pictures in that time. On the 28th December I had been in Islington and on 3rd January I went to Hammersmith, later in the month continuing to South Kensington. January 24th I got on my bike to go to Colnbrook and Slough and on the 29th I cycled to Brentford. But from all those dates I can only find a handful of colour images – with just a few more similar frames to those here that I’ve not digitised. I’ve no idea why this was.
This scene looked very familiar to me and trying to locate it was part of the reason for my looking up the details of my movements above. Unfortunately the street name on the end of that rather unusually shaped block is almost lost in film grain but eventually by looking at it at 100% on the negative I was able (with the help of some Natural Intelligence and memory) to decipher it as Rheidol Terrace. The Rheidol Terrace block is on the corner with St Peter Street and I think my picture was taken from the edge of the Packington Estate, described in an Islington Tribune 2019 article about its regeneration as “A VAST network of walkways offering a safe space for drug dealers to hide along with few green spaces for children to play.” The area has changed significantly since then.
There is still an Imperial Dragon on Fulham Palace Road and I think this picture was probably taken at the same place in 1993. It is now ‘Chinese & Pizza’.
I’m not sure the exact location of this small play area, but the distinctive church tower is that of St Paul’s Hammersmith, rebuilt in Victorian Gothic in 1882–1891, architects J P Seddon and H R Gough. The railway had brought more development to Hammersmith and a larger parish church was needed. It got its Grade II* listing mainly on account of the fittings and monuments inside from the earlier church and a pulpit from Wren’s church of All Hallows-the-Great.
I walked more of less past this Laundry most months on my way to visit friends in a council flat in Kennington and occasionally photographed it as the paintwork increasinly decayed, though more often in black and white than in colour. It was never open as I visited them on Sundays, but I could not decide when it actually went out of business.
This and the bookies next door are now an art gallery.
My route on my bike to Slough took me through Poyle and Colnbrook and I detoured rather to look at the industrial sites at Poyle.
The Poyle Trading Estates (Britannia Trading Estate, Mckay Trading Estate, Trident Industrial Estate, Colne Trading Estate, Skyway Trading Estate, Poyle Industrial Estate) developed largely after the opening of Heathrow Airport in 1946, only a short distance away. Previously there had been a large explosives factory set up by Cogswell & Harrison in 1906 (and earlier still I gunpowder mills on the River Colne.)
Some of these early buildings from the late 1940s, though very much in a 1930s style, still remain in use among the many more modern industrial and commercial buildings, but the railway line that served the area – with two stations in Poyle – was closed to passengers in 1965. I remember going to Poyle on the diesel railcar from Staines West station (now offices). Goods traffic ceased around 1981 and some of the line was removed for the building of the M25.
Another of the 1940s factory buildings on Willow Road in the Poyle Industrial Estate.
Colnbrook was one of the first villages to get a bypass, its narrow and crooked High Street clearly not suitable for the increasing motor traffic on the Bath Road. The Bypass opened in 1927.
Colnbrook High Street had been littered with coaching inns where horses could be changed and travellers served with refreshment. Though legend says that for some wealthy travellers in the 17th century their night in the Blue Room at the Ostrich Inn would be their last, as after eating and drinking well, once asleep a lever tilted their four-poster bed, tipping them into a vat of boiling liquid in the kitchen below. Publican John Jarman and his wife are alleged to have murdered at least 60 for the money they carried with them to carry out their business in those days.
But I think there was only one café on the bypass – and the lorries that called in churned up the car park which seemed always full of huge puddles. Back in 1993, Sunday was still a quiet day for business and transport and the car pack was empty – and the café possibly closed, though I did stand beside a lorry to make this picture.
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