Watching Eltham change ................ nu 3 looking across at the old co-op on the High street with the promise of things to come

Now this will always be the co-op  for me, but then I left Eltham in 1973 when we still had that bookshop near Boots the Chemist, Willcox’s beside Burton’s was still selling newspapers, paperbacks and much else and our railway station was called Well Hall.

Of course nothing stays the same and I am grateful to Jean, Chrissy and Larissa for regularly sending me pictures of the bits that have changed.

And that brings me back to Poundland, which was the site of the old RACS and will in the fullness of time become the site of our new cinema.

As someone who remembers the three picture houses we had with great fondness it is good to know that the plans are in place for a new one.

This is the first of Larissa’s pictures which will form part of a project to record the arrival of the new cinema and sits beside her growing set of pictures of that development at the other end of the High Street.

All too often we fail to clock the changes and within a few years have forgotten what was once there so I look forward to seeing how the project develops and only wish I had photographed our old cinema on the corner of the High Street and Westmount Road.

It was opened in 1913 and demolished in 1968 which means I must have seen it countless times on my way to school at Crown Woods but even now it does not register with me.

Picture; Eltham High Street, September 2015, courtesy of Larissa Hemment