Never go home …………. “or Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be”

This was the advice given to me a long time ago.

At the time I thought it was rubbish because home is where you are from, where your family live and where many of your memories reside.

And so after I left Eltham in the autumn of 1969 for Manchester I did regularly go back, but the arrival of my own family trips became less frequent and now the last time will have been a decade ago.

I still touch base, through family, friends, and of course social media, and over the years continue to write about the house in Well Hall, the Pleasance, the High Street and Crown Woods.

But it is all at a distance and I know I am an “expat” with my experiences pretty much frozen in time.  

That said Well Hall and Eltham still look familiar.  True there are the odd changes, but it ain’t that different from how I left it.

Not so Woolwich where the transformation has been so profound that I find it hard to recognise great chunks of the place.  

Street names may have stayed the same and the odd building is recognizable, but it is like looking through a dirty window.  Bits look vaguely familiar but not much.

And so the warning “never go home” has come through.

Not that I am going down the line that it is “all rubbish now”, or “not like the old days”.  Places change, and in the passage of half a century they change a lot.

All of which was brought home to me by a series of pictures our Elizabeth sent up to me yesterday after she and Colin had spent a weekend in Woolwich.

Their flight from the city was later than mine, but they too were just passing through.

So, for no other reason than I can, and because there will be others like me who found it difficult finding my way around, here are some of those pictures of the Woolwich I have lost.

Well not entirely there is that Wimpy Bar …….

Location; Woolwich

Pictures; Woolwich in December, 2023, from the collection of Elizabeth Fitzpatrick