Some have already appeared and others will be familiar because as iconic buildings they are well known.
Now the telephone exchange was a place I took for granted and I don’t remember a time when it was not there on St Mary’s Road.
Until recently I was not that impressed with it but it does have a solid boldness which speaks of the 1930s when it was built and the more I look at it the fonder I have become of this big brick built place.
But I have a problem because all the authorities suggest it was built in the 30’s and it does look like a 30’s building which is confirmed by a survey from 1949-54, but another map dating from to 1936 to 52 all the original houses are shown stretching up from Queens Road round to Dundas Road.
The key I suspect will be the origin of those maps, and who commissioned them.
In the meantime the 30’s seems to be the decade because Ms Gwen Wilkinson was working in the exchange during the last war when a bomb landed in the yard close to their surface shelter behind the exchange.*
Now with all these things there will be someone out there who knows more than me and will tell me so.
Well I hope so.
All of which just leaves me to reflect that living in Lausanne Road we were just round the corner, which on days when we waited for the party line to clear it would have been easier to walk round to St Mary’s Road
Picture; New Cross Telephone Exchange, 2011, © Copyright Stephen Craven and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence, http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2331589
*The Bomb at New Cross telephone Exchange, WW2 People’s War BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/73/a5885373.shtml
The original New Cross Telephone Exchange (from 1909) was in Briant Street, the bomb incident was there. The new St Mary's Road exchange which replaced it opened in 1953 though I believe construction started in late 1940s.
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