Yesterday was one of those wet grey miserable days.
The rain had been intermittent but when it did come down it was that fine stuff that somehow manages to penetrate your clothes, didn’t stop and just made you thoroughly miserable.
But on a bright note there was Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2 which always brings back memories of Saturdays in Well Hall listening to Saturday Club which before the pirate ships arrived followed by Radio 1 was pretty much all you could rely for “pop music.”
There was of course Radio Luxemburg but this faded and returned with monotonous regularity and in between offered up Horace Batchelor.*
All of which just left you waiting for Sundays and Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman.
I won’t be alone in owning up to sitting with an old reel to reel tape recorder and trying to catch the top
twenty “hits.” Nor will I be alone in not quite managing to catch the beginning or the end before
Alan Freeman jumped in with the machine gun delivery.
Now in an age of digital streaming such antics sit with the wind up gramophone and the telegram.
And yet all of them are well within the living memory of many of the population and serve to remind us just how quickly technology moved on.
Not that this is either a diatribe against progress or a nostalgic trip to a rosy past.
Instead it is just a reflection on how things change which in some cases are so dramatic that they can leave you feeling a stranger.
So on the rare occasions I go back to Woolwich if find it difficult to match my memories of Beresford Square and the area in front of the station with what is there now.
Eltham seems to have changed less but unless you go back regularly there can still be the odd building which wasn’t there before, like the one down Pound Place which our Theresa posted earlier today on the Well Hall site.**
It has elicited quite a stir and most of the comments are not flattering, and I must admit it is simple architecture but that said I am guessing much the same was said when those single storey shops went up on the High Street in the 1930s or the huge Hinds store opened around the same time.
I bet there will even have been the odd Well Hall resident who mourned the passing of the fields when the
Progress Estate was built in 1915.
Location; Eltham
Pictures; Eltham High Street, 2014 from the collection of Elizabeth & Colin Fitzpatrick and Pound Place, 2017 courtesy of Theresa Simpson-lee
** Horace Cyril Batchelor was as an advertiser on Radio Luxembourg. He advertised a way to win money by predicting the results of football matches, sponsoring programmes on Radio Luxembourg.
**Well Hall in Eltham, its stories and its history
 |
| Looking up the High Street, 2014 |
But on a bright note there was Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2 which always brings back memories of Saturdays in Well Hall listening to Saturday Club which before the pirate ships arrived followed by Radio 1 was pretty much all you could rely for “pop music.”
There was of course Radio Luxemburg but this faded and returned with monotonous regularity and in between offered up Horace Batchelor.*
All of which just left you waiting for Sundays and Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman.
 |
| Down Pound Place, 2017 |
twenty “hits.” Nor will I be alone in not quite managing to catch the beginning or the end before
Alan Freeman jumped in with the machine gun delivery.
Now in an age of digital streaming such antics sit with the wind up gramophone and the telegram.
And yet all of them are well within the living memory of many of the population and serve to remind us just how quickly technology moved on.
Not that this is either a diatribe against progress or a nostalgic trip to a rosy past.
Instead it is just a reflection on how things change which in some cases are so dramatic that they can leave you feeling a stranger.
So on the rare occasions I go back to Woolwich if find it difficult to match my memories of Beresford Square and the area in front of the station with what is there now.
Eltham seems to have changed less but unless you go back regularly there can still be the odd building which wasn’t there before, like the one down Pound Place which our Theresa posted earlier today on the Well Hall site.**
It has elicited quite a stir and most of the comments are not flattering, and I must admit it is simple architecture but that said I am guessing much the same was said when those single storey shops went up on the High Street in the 1930s or the huge Hinds store opened around the same time.
I bet there will even have been the odd Well Hall resident who mourned the passing of the fields when the
Progress Estate was built in 1915.
Location; Eltham
Pictures; Eltham High Street, 2014 from the collection of Elizabeth & Colin Fitzpatrick and Pound Place, 2017 courtesy of Theresa Simpson-lee
** Horace Cyril Batchelor was as an advertiser on Radio Luxembourg. He advertised a way to win money by predicting the results of football matches, sponsoring programmes on Radio Luxembourg.
**Well Hall in Eltham, its stories and its history
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