Tag: sheep

I’ve always found Shepherds Bush confusing. My first visits to the area were infrequent trips with my mother to visit an elderly woman relative who lived alone in a flat on the Goldhawk Rd, an exiting visit, travelling to Hammersmith on the tube and then a bus. And it was a secret mission on which I was sworn to silence; Blanche had been ostracised by all her relations except my mother. This was around 1950 and divorce was still seen by many as something shocking. I remember being rather disappointed to find this ‘scarlet woman’ was much the same colour as me.

Sheep could certainly not safely graze at Shepherds Bush, and were best keeping well out of trouble on this arch above the subway under the M41 West Cross Route, built as part of Ringway 1, part of a series of motorway rings which would have destroyed London. The damage they would cause became very apparent during the building of the Westway and West Cross Route and the scheme was abandoned, with fortunately only a few sections completed. The road was demoted to the A3220 in 2000 but cyclists are still prohibited. The subway is immediately to the north of the Holland Park roundabout.

Eight years later, in July 1996, I returned here together with around 6,000 others to hold a party and protest on the M41 here which blocked the road for over 8 hours. I left before it ended, climbing over a wall and ending up on Freston Road, taking the Underground to Hammersmith from Latimer Road Station.

One of the confusing things about Shepherds Bush were the two Underground stations around 500 yards apart and on different lines, but both named Shepherds Bush. I think both were built around 1900. The Central Line station in the picture was replaced by a new station in 2008, and the Hammersmith & City station was then renamed Shepherd’s Bush Market.

The footbridge leading across Shepherds Bush close to the Central Line Station to the large 1967 shopping centre on its south side added to the confusion with a giant Intercity 125 Train on its side, despite it leading to the Concorde shoppint centre. It confused me still more by disappearing completely two years after I too its picture, plagued with problems as the escalators kept breaking down and a few people found it funny to drop things from it onto passing traffic.

There are still two quite separate stations called Shepherds Bush, as a new National Rail Shepherds Bush station opened close to the Central Line station in 2008. It had been meant to open as a Silverlink station on the line from Clapham Junction to Willesden Junction in 2007, but when completed they found one platform was 18 inches less wide than safety regulations required. By the time this was put right the following year it was a part of the London Overground. Perhaps had this change been anticipated it would have been designed with a tunnel leading the the Underground station rather than having to go through two ticket barriers and across a roadway busy with buses to change trains here.

The station developments were for the opening of the huge Westfield shopping centre on the White City site. Although the new Overground station was built on the site of the long-disused Uxbridge Road station it required the demolition of the building I rather liked close to the Holland Park roundabout. Its design as a giant gate echoes in plain form the excessively ornate gateway built here at Shepherd Bush for the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition at White City which attracted over eight million paying customers, and I believe this was indeed a much slimmed-down version of the entrance to the exhibition halls, converted for office use.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.