Goodbye to the ABC in the High Street .................. 1972

Now this picture postcard of the old ABC cinema in the High Street has a lot going for it.

For a start there is that simple observation that few of us send picture postcards today.

Mobile phones with cameras which can snap and send an image around the world in seconds have pretty much done for the old picture postcard.

Of course long before this technological whizz the postcard had its day.  The cost of postage and the demise of the frequent postal collection and delivery meant that bit by bit they were used less and less.

Unlike the start of the last century when if you wanted to arrange to meet in the afternoon or tell family you’d be home later that day the postcard was the thing.

And the early 70s I guess was the cross over point when the sale and use of the picture card was in decline.

Not that the Eltham Society thought so when they produced this one which was number 4 in a series on Eltham and may well have been chosen to mark the passing of this picture house which had opened its doors in the August of 1922 and closed half a century later.

I have fond memories of the place, it was after all a safer choice than the Odeon to take a girlfriend given that we lived just a few minute’s walk from the roundabout and you never wanted to encounter family on your first date.

Its passing caught me unawares.  At the beginning of 1972 I went back to College in Manchester and when I returned at Easter it had shown its last film and gone dark.

I can’t now remember if I took in a film at the cinema before I left home but given that the ABC was showing the newly released Steptoe and Son I don’t think I did.

And that may gives us a day in January for when the photograph was taken.

Of course given the large number of young people waiting outside it could be a Saturday but as the film was classified an A and there are plenty of adults accompanying the children it is equally likely that it will be a matinee in what was left of the holidays.

So I guess I shall have to go looking in the local press for January 1972 and in the meantime reflect on the wonderful collection of images held by the Greenwich Heritage Centre, from where I found this one.

Pictures, Eltham ABC, 1972, GRW 1647, http://boroughphotos.org/greenwich/ courtesy of Greenwich Heritage Centre, http://www.greenwichheritage.org/site/index.php