Back with the White Lion and the Scala in 1960 with a message destined for the other side of the Iron Curtain

Now, you can wait for a postcard on Withington to appear and then two turn up at the same time.

So after yesterday’s picture of the Scala on Wilmslow Road here is almost the same scene shot from the other side.

And I rather think it will have been the same photographer who just walked the few yards and set up business all over again.

So there in the corner is the picture house with the White Lion beside it.

I knew both of them well but it will be a full decade before the dive bar was opened in the cellar, with the posters which aped politicians from the old Soviet Union and ere really only adverts for Watney’s Red Barrel.

The date on the collection is 1960 but our card was sent seven years later in April 1967.

And it  is a pointer to the longevity of the postcard which had begun in the late 19th century but was very much on a downward spiral by the time this one started on its journey to Czechoslovakia.

Once in the absence of the telephone and frequent deliveries and collections the picture postcard was the most effective way of sending a message.

So much so that one sent in the morning would arrive later in the day.

But of course by 1967 all that was changing for while there might still not be a phone in every home there would be a phone box pretty much everywhere.

I can still remember the long cold evenings spent phoning home from the kiosk on the corner of Wilmslow and Egerton Crescent, but that is beginning to offer up a little too much detail so I shall close with the observation that our card was gong behind the Iron Curtain and 1967 was a full year before the Prague Spring and many decades before the fall of the Wall.

And if that is not enough of a puzzle there is one more and that revolves around the film at the Scala which on that summer's day in 1960 was East of Java.

Now the only film I can track down was Krakatoa, East of Java, which came out in 1969 and is unlikely to have hit Withington until the early 70s.

Of course there will be an explanation and I guess some one with the knowledge to solve the mystery.

We shall see.

Picture; Wilmlsow Road and the White Lion 1960, from the set Withington Lillywhite, Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history

Standing on the corner and watching the changes in Withington …………… Wilmlsow Road

2019

I don’t “go off on one” when places I have known for years start to change.

It is after all the way of things, although sometimes we lose buildings of significance.

All of which brings me to the corner of Wilmslow, Parsonage and Burton Roads.

It is a spot which did not seem to change for ages, and so looking at a 1960 photograph, I am reminded of how similar it was a decade later when I was briefly living there and still hadn’t changed much a full twenty years on.

2019

But as Andy’s pictures show the transformation has grown a pace.

The White Lion went along time ago as did the cinema, but the Scala’s replacement is relatively new.

Across the road what had been the corner shop/restraunat has gone and a new building is slowing rising to the sky.

I rather took that building for granted.

It was an addition to the row of shops which were themselves added to the front of a row of houses.

1960

In 1894, that tiny corner plot was an open space.

I remember it as a shop, although I would be hard pressed to say what it sold, and later we ate there when it was a restaurant, and now it will be a four-storey building with retail/commercial space at ground floor and seven self-contained flats above with two studio flats, four one-bed and one two-bed flats.

Location; Withington

Pictures, corner of Wilmslow, Parsonage and Burton Roads, 2019, from the collection of Andy Robertson and hopping Centre from the set Withington Lillywhite, Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history

Remembering the Scala, and the White Lion in Withington in 1960

We are in Withington in 1960 and for anyone who knows this bit of south Manchester the scene is familiar enough.

I remember it well because it was around here that I had my first bed sit and from 1969-73 it was where I called home.

A place which pretty much was bounded by the library to the north and the White Lion to the south.

The stretch inbetween had the usual mix of shops, a launderette the Co-op and the Albert.

But as ever what seems familiar at first glance is a world away from the scene today.

The White Lion just outside the shot on the left is now a supermarket, the Scala Cinema has gone and Handforth Ltd is now an opticians.

Likewise on the other side the traditional shop on the corner is now a restaraunt.

But I suspect there will be many who remember this corner and will be able to talk about the pints they have drunk in the huge old pub along with the films they saw at the picture house.

All of which I did along with buying milk from the vending machine by the Scala after the pub closed.*

For this was a time before the late night shopper when you could be fairly certain that by ten past eleven on any night of the week not much stirred on the corner of Palatine and Burton Road.

*Who laments the passing of the old milk machine? http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/who-laments-passing-of-old-milk-machine.html

Picture; Shopping Centre from the set Withington Lillywhite, Tuck & Sons, courtesy of TuckDB http://tuckdb.org/history