Vague Memories of Coffee Bar Culture

So far as I can remember there never was one of those signifiers of cosmopolitan life in the early 1960s - the Wimpy bar - in Southall, my first thought was that Southall must have been too provincial but I remember there was a Wimpy in Hayes, a much fringier place. I also remember the one in West Ealing, plastic tables, coffee machine noises and froth, flat grills, that totally unhealthy smell of greasy burgers and onions, coffee, steamy windows in the winter and, the ultimate in romance - the RumBaba. What there was in Southall, though, in a parade of small and rickety shops between the old fire station and the George and Dragon pub, which no longer exists, was a small coffee bar. This was a place of vague Italian pretensions, with a Gaggia machine or something similar, where teenagers not old enough for the pub could go, especially at the weekend. It was near two record shops, one just across the road and the other round the corner in South Road and not far from several clothes shops where things like Levi jeans and purple mohair jumpers could be found. There were also several 'greasy spoon' cafes - I remember one on Featherstone Road, where teenagers could gather.

Libraries

I remember that, in the 1950s, there used to be a local library van, a kind of converted removal van, with shelves and books and a desk at the front, which travelled around and parked in various places, I think it had electrical sockets on small concrete posts where it would plug in. I remember it used to park by the medical clinic in Northcote Road. Before the days of relative affluence and JK Rowling the number of books available to children was much less, things of the 'Just William' kind, but some of us did benefit from that mobile library.

Later, I became a regular at the Southall Library, in Osterley Park Road. This was a splendid example of Edwardian public building, through an imposing entrance to a temple with polished wood and a grand staircase, lino or stone floors and wooden shelves which, with the books, gave off the smell of learning. I used to borrow art books, usually large and heavy, and carry them home as trophies. They were so interesting that the overdue fine system became very familiar to me. There was a desk in the middle where librarians lurked, coming and going with trolleys and stacks of books, or stamping the little cards that would be inserted into the cardboard holders in the books. The library was well stocked and a haven for the studious. I had an English teacher, Mr Russell, who lived on the same road and told me about some of the twentieth century poets whose work could be found there. He was very much into 'improving' working class lads like myself. There was quite a large section on philosophy, politics and history, which was well used - in those days some of us believed in historical progress. Also, I'd say, many a teenager learned a little from some of the medical reference books there (while never, of course, taking them home). Upstairs, the high ceilinged and windowed reference section also had rooms full of glass cabinets containg the peculiar Martinware pottery which had been made in Southall. This was where I first encountered the genus 'older library lurker', who would spend hours studying a few newspapers. In the 1960s, an era of 'modernisation', things like Martinware began to seem archaic, but I gather lately the same Martinware pottery became desirable enough for a new species of library lurker to organise a blag from the library.

Southall only gained its status as a borough in 1936 and that ended in 1965, so the library was a truly local centre for less than 30 years, but it and the branch libraries played a really important part in growing up there in the years before wall to wall television and the internet. I remember being taken to a children's library from school (probably the one on Lady Margaret Road), sat on the floor cross-legged and having stories (could have been Enid Blyton or LadyBird) read by the librarian, very exotic.

The Market and Blacksmith

Just off the High Street, every Saturday, there was (and I think still is) an open air market. This could be quite a large affair, with stalls and vans selling clothes, household goods, toys, food and tools. It was a magnet for the area and the market itself, a rectangular patch of land reached through a narrower entrance, was often jam-packed. When the market was on the local pubs: Plough, White Hart and George and Dragon, would be busy at lunchtime and many vehicles parked in pub carparks, in front of the Odeon cinema and along both sides of the road by the park and the High Street (this was an era well before yellow lines and breathalyzers). The old police station, in the same place as now but then very Dixon-of-Dock-Greenish with its steps to the front, wooden sash windows right onto the street and a blue police lamp above the door, was very close by. The market was especially busy in the run-up to christmas, when the entrance would be full of christmas trees, and also at fair times.

The same venue was also used on Wednesdays for horse dealing. Again the road outside would be full of vehicles each side and up beyond the park gate, but this time they were horse-boxes and other trailers. For most locals this was an 'outside' affair, since there were very few locally owned or stabled horses, but we were all familiar with it and with the sight and sound of horses being led up and down the roads. I also remember, as a young boy in the 1950s, being taken in to see the blacksmith, who had a premises just behind the police station in North Road, not far from the market. I saw horses being shod there, remember the fire and bellows inside, steam coming off the hooves when water was poured on them and the smell of the hot metal. I think the blacksmith also did other work than shoeing horses. I have a vague memory that there was a shop for tackle on the High Street but I would need this confirmed.

Bridges and Tunnels

The railway, when I was growing up, was a huge physical and sensual entity which ran through the middle of Southall like a river. I've mentioned the division of the town into two by it: 'the other side' and 'new Southall', but the barrier had its crossings. The most obvious is Station Bridge, that great hump which rose, on metal stilts, from the Post Office and Glass House pub on one side, peaked at the station building and dropped to the shops on the Green. That's where the buses crossed and was the main road linking the two Southalls. There used to be a hostel there for railway workers, drivers and firemen, who often spent days away from home on trips, as did my own grandfather. It was a functional slab of a place, a load of regular steel window frames. But, as a boy, I also followed other routes across. There was the dingy foot tunnel, which ran under the shunting yard, 10 or 12 tracks wide, from White Street on one side to Spencer Street on the other, with metal obstacles at each end to stop cycling. The shunting yard itself was a noisy and busy place. Up until the early 1960s first steam engines then diesels moved lines of goods wagons forwards and backwards. There was lot of clanking and squealing, often into the night when noise carried on the wind into the surrounding area and it had vague industrial smell. Shunters used to hang onto the sides of the engines and jump off to hook and unhook bits of trains with poles.

The gasworks next to it had its own strange little engine, which used to move coal and coke wagons in and out of the works sidings. Not far away, another way to cross the tracks was along the canal, at the Hayes end of Southall. You could walk along the towpath, by the wall of the gasworks and under the tracks, to where two canals met and turn left back towards Western Road. The station these days is a somewhat sad and truncated version of what it used to be. then it had a grand booking hall, with a couple of hatches, off the bridge and three or four big staircases down to platforms. There used to be a machine on the platform where you could punch your name into a metal strip. As well as the booking office staff I remember there being porters with trolleys. Sometimes an engine would be stationed at a little platform to one side. There was the usual wooden planking across the sloped end of the platform where porters (and others) would cross the tracks and the usual sign telling passengers not to do it. Just beyond the platforms was was a signal box which still had the old brass levers. Between trains the signalman would lean out of the window and just beyond that was another way to cross the railway: the footbridge from Park Avenue to Bridge Road, the old Bachelor's factory and the Community Centre. The Villiers Road-Park Avenue part of town was slightly 'upmarket' private housing and the railway separated it from the factory area over the tracks. The bridge was a long, narrow wooden affair and in the days of steam trains it was exciting enough to stand on it as the big express engines came thundering underneath. It had steps in the middle which went down to Southall Engine Shed and you could see drivers and firemen in their blue denims, with their kit bags, going to and from work. There was a small building with a track running into it where post was delivered and there was a parcel depot. When I was quite young there were railway vans which delivered parcels from there to local houses and businesses. Beyond the engine shed, right by the edge of the old AEC works, was another tunnel. To get to it you went by the side of the park along Green Drive, more middle range private houses. It started with a narrow alley, with a high wall for the AEC works (and a small works entrance) on one side. Then it went under the railway and came out to Glade Lane, which went on to the canal. That part of town in the 1950s and early 1960s was quite cut off. The canal area had some hidden places and I remember catching things like grasshoppers and slow-worms there. There used to be an AEC equivalent of the gasworks engine as well, a strange little diesel engine, built in house, when AEC had its own siding off the railway which ran into the works. Near there was also the turntable for the engine shed where you could watch the engines and also a playing field where railway workers played football. My grandfather used to look after the pitch there. These tunnels and bridges were not built for the convenience of children of course, or even for people to shop or visit parks, they were there to allow people to go to and from their workplaces, which helps define what Southall was, from the 1930s onward: a centre of industry. I remember men in large numbers on bikes and walking, with an increasing number in cars through the 60s, going from one side to another, to the factories and works. In those days shifts started at 6am, so certain parts were always busy.

Sporting Clubs

I was never that much into either but two places I remember members of my family going were the billiard club that stood on the corner of Beaconsfield Road and South Road and the Billiard and Snooker hall above the Burtons shop on the corner of the Broadway and Alexandra Road. These were basically retreats for men and the couple of times I was in the one above Burtons, reached up a straight high staircase, I recall the dimness, the over-lights, the score boards and the smoky atmosphere - an absolutely typical snooker club in other words. The club life for men I have alluded to before: the Legion, Labour Club, Conservative Club and so on, the sporting clubs were part of that. Southall Football Club, where my grandfather worked as groundsman for a couple of years, also had its club life for supporters, as did the greyhound track near Havelock Road. Railway workers had their sporting club and I think other workplaces did as well, AEC certainly had playing fields and a clubhouse. These were all alternatives to the pubs and provided venues for social functions as well.

There was also an overlap. Two pubs close to Norwood Green, the Wolf and the Lamb, both had cricket teams and played a match every year. The winner was awarded as trophy an enlarged cricket bat which was hung on a bracket outside of the winning pub. There were also many darts teams based in pubs; my father and cousins played in a pub league. Pubs could be taken over almost totally on competition nights. I have some memories of people keeping racing pigeons as well but I can't remember where they met.

Bits

There are many things which contribute to the 'feel' of daily life in Southall in the 1950s and 60s which are not particular to it alone, but which serve to illustrate life in the area as it was.

I have already spoken of 'George', the mobile greengrocer, who used to come door to door with his horse and cart selling vegetables - and things like locally sourced eggs - every week. The electric milkfloats which delivered milk (very quietly) would also be familiar from then. The Fowler's bread vans delivering on their rounds: locally baked bread delivered locally by horse and cart. How ecological was that? Then, on Sunday evenings a man would come on a trycycle boxcart and sell shellfish street by street. He'd come a bit of the road and ring a bell and people who wanted winkles, cockles and such would go out to him. Someone else came from time to time selling watercress from a large tray which they carried over their head. A 'Breton onion man' would come door to door on a bike laden with strings of onions and dressed in a beret. I remember a man walking very slowly down the middle of the road singing and collecting. The proverbial man with a suitcase full of cleaning things would put in an occasional appearance on doorsteps.

There were also various collectors who came to the door: Co-op, Pearl, the 'rent-man', salesmen. Coal was delivered by coal-cart (again sometimes horsedrawn) and carried in on coalmen's backs. My cousin did this for a while and clean and easy it wasn't. When I was young we separated the household waste into 'the bin' and 'the pig man', who came in a lorry to collect all the organic stuff. Presumably it went to fairly local pig farms as swill. Milk came in varieties of bottles: gold, red and silver tops, pint and half-pint. Milkmen also delivered orange juice in similar bottles. Bottles were washed and recycled.

Bin-men tended to live and work locally. They lifted heavy metal bins on their backs to throw into the carts. Likewise the streets were swept by hand and locally, by men who came with carts they pulled along.

Until 1965 Southall had its own council and the Town Hall and the administration in the buildings around it were quite accessible to most people, on foot. I think the old Manor House was used by the council as well. I remember the mayor of Southall coming to my school in regalia and chains. The Cottage Hospital, near the Manor House, was used for small injuries and day procedures and was very intimate. As a child I was there a few times.

I used to go to a GP surgery which had a group practice and a surgery-clinic, very novel at a time when most GPs worked alone and from houses. My surgery was staffed by three Jewish doctors of radical and intellectual bent, with a social agenda. The oldest was Doctor Ginsburg, then Doctor Cline and lastly Doctor Freeling. I knew them all over the years. They had differing 'techniques': Ginsberg was fatherly and retiring; Cline could be perhaps a little overdirect; Freeling was gentle, had a great clientel among children and was more than a little involved in the lives of those in trouble. In years gone by, before the NHS, when people paid for GPs, Ginsberg was also known to treat and not charge when the situation demanded it.

Music Places

Growing up, I remember some of the local pubs used to have music. The best known was the White Hart, which had music in the back bar most weeks. It was a main venue during the trad jazz and skiffle booms. Chris Barber's band was a regular and other well known jazz bands, such as Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, played there, as well as Lonny Donegan. Later it hosted alternative rock and folk and the Freeman Syndicate ran a weekly club there. The Red Lion once had dance music in its back bar, almost a ballroom, which I remember from when I was very young. There was a beer garden outside. The Northcote Arms, which was surrounded by houses and off the main road, had rock music on a regular basis for a while. You went in along the side. They used to have a big dog which lived upstairs and would come out onto the flat roof and bark. I was in school with the son of the pub and going upstairs to the living quarters was a slightly exotic experience. From time to time there was trouble there, with 'visiting' teenagers. Other pubs had the occasional gig.
What there wasn't was a regular club with live music, even in a rented hall. There was one even in the depths of Belfont in Hayes, which had quite well known groups like the Steam Packet (Rod Stewart among others) in the early 1960s, but never in Southall, which certainly had enough people to go to gigs. So we used to travel: to the Ealing Club (Mann Hugg Blues Brothers, later Manfred Mann), Goldhawk Road (the Who), the Crawdaddy in Richmond (Rolling Stones I think) and Eel Pie Island (too many to mention).
Southall never produced any real bands in this period (it did produce Jim Marshall, who made the amps all the bands used) and maybe the lack of a regular venue contributed to that. Earlier, Cleo Lane, the jazz singer, had the benefit of the White Hart as a starter.
Later, of course, the Hamborough Tavern became notorious for music of an altogether different kind, but in the late 50s and 60s I don't remember music there.

Churches

Well within my lifetime, long before the landscape of Southall was altered by the topography of religion, as well as race, before there were temples, gurdwaras and mosques, but in real terms not that long ago, the various christian churches were intimately integrated into the life of the area, although one might not think so now, ill-used and stranded as they are, or just plain gone.

The big Church of England bases were St George's, at the top of Lancaster Road; Holy Trinity, across from Southall Park and the old church on the corner of King Street and Western Road. The Methodist centre was the impressive King's Hall on South Road and I remember Baptist, Congregationalist and other non-conformist churches, I think in Villiers Road. I also remember seeing people dressed up on Sundays to go to church. I used to go to Sunday school in the Ebeneezer Hall, which was off The Green, I think in Kingston Road. It smelt of polished wood, there was a trap-door beneath which was a bath for baptism and it had a harmonium. My religion at that time, like most of the children who went there on Sundays, was far from strict Baptist, but you could also get bars of chocolate for remembering scripture and there were girls.

My family, like most, was nominally C of E, which meant the vicars were called upon for marriages, christenings and deaths. I might have attended church once or twice with the cubs, school societies or harvest festivals, but that was it. I do remember there was quite a good choir in St George's with which I had a very brief acquaintance. There were active members of the church around us, but their beliefs did not impinge on daily life for most people.

Not so, for example, with the Salvation Army (which had a hall, The Kingdom Hall, on the Uxbridge Road, near Hamborough Road I think. They were out on the street with their band around Southall, holding meetings and giving out leaflets, or collecting for their work. One of the leading figures was Councillor Haigh, who was also active in the Labour Party. I went to school with members of the Haigh family, I remember him coming to our door with family members to canvas for re-election.

The Catholic church was St Anselm's, on The Green, which also had schools attached. This tended to separate Catholic children who went there from the rest of us, although not totally. In later years (the 1980s) nuns from St Anselm's, who worked with older people in the area, had a very good relationship with my grandfather, who was a convinced atheist. They didn't mind, he liked discussions and the Church of England, of which he was nominaly a member, was nowhere to be seen. St Anselm's always had a more scattered membership which was also more involved. I knew people of Irish, Scottish and Polish extraction who went there and on the odd occasion saw a priest or curate in school, (not all Catholic kids went there).

My memories of the Kings Hall are of using bits of it as temporary classrooms when I was in school and singing in massed choirs for Christmas there. It had a more circular structure than C of E churches and the roof was quite high.

The public rituals of christianity, such as christmas services, harvest festivals, easter and so on, as well as war remembrance services, were still part of growing up in Southall, I would say, well into the 1970s and perhaps later. There was a march on Remembrance Sunday, to the local cenotaph by the Manor House, with British Legion, scouts, Boy's Brigade and others taking part. Schools would collect food and other things for harvest festival and take them to old and 'needy' people via the churches. Christmas was an occasion for school plays and visits to carol services (how many people were Joseph, an angel or, perhaps, Mary?). These things linked my generation, the post-war baby boomers and the half-generation which followed us, to hundreds of years of tradition.

The 1960s saw changes and decline in Southall churches, like many other things. As we 'baby boomers' came onstream we had other priorities.

Various Halls

Among the places I encountered growing up there were a number of halls where weddings and suchlike took place. I have already mentioned Shackleton Hall but there was also, at the corner of King Street and Featherstone Road, the Co-op Hall, which was above the Co-op shop (more of that another time). This was a square and spartan place with a boarded floor, a few supporting pillars and a low stage at one end. I remember it had an upright piano. I was there for weddings and meetings of various kinds. Not far from it, along Featherstone Road, was the Working Men's Club. This was a club of the old type, with a bar and a social area. I vaguely remember that there was sometimes music there (and possibly comedians) but it was more frequented by my father's generation than mine. Back towards the railway, off the Green and quite near the old Gem cinema was the British Legion, another club and bar, I was only in there once or twice, it was mainly for ex-servicemen and their wives. At the top of Lady Margaret Road, just behind the old Town Hall, was a hall which I think belonged to Holy Trinity church. I think it's now a Hindu temple. In my day it was used for social, family and other gatherings as well as church things. Sideways from it, again behind the Town Hall and reached through a lane that ran between the Town Hall and the old Fire Station, was the Conservative Club. I can't remember ever seeing the inside of that although my father was there.

My point of reference was more the old Labour Club, on the Broadway next to Woolworths, a very substantial affair. It had a bar and social area downstairs, various meeting rooms, upstairs and down, where Labour coouncillors, party members and trade unions met until 1965 when Southall became part of Ealing. Upstairs was also a large hall with a high and large stage which had proceneum arches and heavy curtains. The Labour Party never officially 'owned' the Labour Club. That role was taken by a committee which was essentially linked to the trades unions. The big ones were the AEU, the rail unions and the general unions. The Labour Party itself had a glorified nissen-hut behind the Club in the car-park, quite adequate, with two office rooms and a meeting room. My grandfather, who was active in ASLEF (train drivers' union), was a founding member of the Labour Club. He told me it came from a time when the unions could find nowhere to meet in the Southall area. ASLEF had had a strike during or just after the First World War and used to meet in the King's Hall Methodist Church on South Road. But there were Australian troops stationed not far away and there was a confrontation, with furniture being used. Other unions had similar problems and an orchard plot, on the Uxbridge Road, was acquired and a hut erected on it. From that the Labour Club grew. The Labour Club had a long drawn out civil war over admitting non-white members, which ran from the mid-1960s. Later, after the Labour Party itself had shifted premises, it became the Southall Club for a while, but its support base got very old and dwindled.

The Town Hall itself had a large room upstairs, the old Southall Council Chamber, which was used for meetings and other functions from the late 1960s. Scattered around southall there were other huts and places for church members, scouts and the like. I remember the Air Training Corps (ATC) had a hut on Featherstone Road.

Shackleton Hall

In the mid to late 1950s, when rock and roll arrived in Britain and David Jacobs, brylcream and all, was huge on black and white TV at 6PM on Saturdays, some of the real action locally was to be found in the Shackleton Hall, at the junction of Greenford Avenue and Shackleton Road. There were dances there where the strains of the Everly Brothers and Elvis could be heard way down the street. I was a bit young to actually get in, but some of us would hang round the outside of the Hall and listen and watch. This was a time when six inch turnups, winkle-pickers, purple mohair sweaters and haircuts such as the 'Tony Curtis' held sway.

The Hall itself was also used for other functions. I attended family weddings there and things like children's parties. It was a strange industrial-Tudor confection of a place really, a giant prefab, with wooden struts and probable white asbestos panels on the outside, windows very high up, so there was no view in or out and a vaulted roof about the height of a house, with bare metal strutwork on the inside. From time to time political meetings, bingo and so on were also held there. Why a road in Southall came to named after an Irish explorer would make an interesting story, none of the other roadds in the area are like named.

Carnivals and so on

I can't remember when it started, or even if it was before I was born, but in the late 1950s and into the 1960s there was a carnival procession in Southall. Floats, often mounted on flat-backed trucks (lorries as used to be) processed through the town to the park. They were often sponsored by local businesses and themed in the usual kind of way. I feel now it was part of the coming out of England from the bleak post-war years which ran into the 1950s, when there was still rationing. Many of the floats were amateur but bright and it was a chance for the scouts, boys brigade and what have you to parade. It also provided an excuse for a fair in the park and a tented village which hosted all sorts of competitions and displays. This was time of growing employment and spending power, when people came onto the streets in numbers and the town was dressed up.

I can't remember when it was (I think the mid-1950s) but I remember a largescale cycle race coming to the Carlyle Road rec. In my memory it was like a mini Tour de France, with a lot of cyclists and support vans. The streets near the rec were festooned with banners and lined with locals and the rec itself was buzzing. For some reason I remember that free Murray Mint sweets were handed out.

Another memory is of a group of buskers who came on Saturdays to the Broadway, usually outside Woolworths. They played trad jazz and a type of marching music and were ex-servicemen, some of them obviously had been wounded. I saw them also in Hammersmith and other centres, so they obviously had a circuit.

We used to welcome the approach of bonfire night, from late October, as the chance to make some money and have a bit of fun. An old pram would be found and some old clothes would be stuffed and turned into a Guy. Either a mask could be bought in one of the sweetshops or one painted on. Various groups of children would stand at places along the Broadway, asking for 'Penny for the Guy' as people went home in the evenings, which by then were dark. Weekends were even better. On one occasion I recall someone's younger brother being put in the pram with a mask on as a Guy substitute. That didn't work so well! Fireworks were bought by most families and let off in gardens or local areas. On the night of November 5th the air hung heavy with the smell of gunpowder and smoke, since bonfires were the other passtime. We would spend time scouring the backs of shops for cardboard and boxes to burn, until parents thought we had enough. In the run up to bonfire night there were the expected issues with bangers and other fireworks on the street (and sometimes in letter boxes).

The Parks

There were a number of parks in Southall, where children played games, adults went to play sports and festive events happened occasionally, when I was growing up. At that time it was totally normal for kids to play in the streets or go off for trips across town to the parks on their own, often for hours.

The central park, or at least the most obvious one, was Southall Park, on the Uxbridge Road. This was the local version of a borough park, when Southall still had its own council, before it became part of the London Borough of Ealing. There was (perhaps still is) a walled area along the side of the the park where plants were cultivated in greenhouses and horticultural work done for the flowerbeds of the whole area. The park had tennis courts but I never knew who used them, apart from the Grammar School. Most people will remember the park-keeper's house, just inside the front gates, built in the quintessential Edwardian cottage style. On the left was a big open grassy area, where 'sporty' stuff happened, then towards the back a dip and an area with more trees and shrubs. Southall Park sported some quite impressive horse chestnut trees on the exit towards Villiers Road where conkers could be gathered in the autumn. Every year there was a carnival procession which ended at the park and a fairground would be set up there (the name of Beach springs to mind but there might have been other fairgrounds), along with stalls and marquees for competitions. On the odd occasion I remember going to the circus there, I think it was Billy Smart's. Later, when I was active in the Labour Party, there was a long political argument over whether or not to keep the high railings around the park. There was a tendency for Asian men to collect in the park in the summer months and this was too 'in the face' for the declining white community which lived around it. The high wire fence was eventually taken down, but in my time the park was locked up for the night - which meant you could climb over and have seclusion, if you had a mind and didn't get caught.

As well as Southall Park there were two 'recreation grounds' (recs), mainly intended for sports. The one off Western Road had an open-air swimming pool which was not very expensive and much used during the summer holidays by local kids in the summer(along with the bigger indoor pool in nearby Heston, which had a high diving board). I remember the bright blue paint on the pool, sometimes crumbling a bit at the edges, the slabbed and tiled pool surround, the wooden doored changing cubicles along each side with their three quarter type doors and the pungent smell of the very chlorinated water, which always seemed to be cold, even on warm days. Just up on the corner from this rec was Fowler's Bakery and a sweet shop near it. It's curious how the smell of the freshly baked bread comes back, just from saying the name.

The other rec was near where I lived in 'new Southall', off Carlyle Road, not far from the Broadway. It was a bit bigger in area and had a cinder running track, segregated behind metal railings. Schools would use this track for sports days, or mark out the grass in lanes. I once remember going there when I was in Tudor Road Infant School and setting up a Maypole with coloured ribbons, which we were taught to dance around. We also had a harvest festival in school at that time, but that's another story. Cricket was played there, as well as football and there was quite a grand pavilion-style changing room in the central area which had a cafe-kiosk where you could get ice-cream, sweets and so on. There were flower beds where council gardeners practiced the dark arts of bedding design and a traditional playground with swings, slides and other things (as well as a very hard tarmac base to damage knees and elbows if you fell off anything, this being well before the days of insurance issues and soft platforms). There were also tennis courts which could be rented by the hour from the keeper in the pavilion and I think there was also a place to play bowls. One side of this rec was against the canal and the wire fence there had various holes made so that smaller people could access the towpath more directly. Another side had a swathe of quite dense undergrowth and trees, very suitable for the type of war games that were often played and with an exit in the far corner to the canal towpath, where the undergrowth continued for miles and, if anything, got denser. I think there were some allotments nearby as well. These places had other uses for teenagers as well.

Not too far from this rec there was also a small park, built later I think, which had a cement paddling pool, painted in the same ubiquitous bright blue as the pool, and a playground. This was intended for younger children and many a sunny day was spent hanging around the paddling pool and buying ice-creams from the inhouse shop or a van.

On days when roaming further afield was in order two other places came into play. First was Osterley Park, originally the grounds and farmland around Osterley Park House, the home of the Earl of Jersey. Many roads and buildings in the Southall area were named for him and his family, Lady Margaret Road for example. Travelling over beyond the Green and round the old road to Norwood Green from Southall was already to enter another world. Once over the canal the houses were mainly older, detatched and with substantial gardens. The area around Norwood Green (where cricket was played by gentlemen) was divided by class from Southall as a whole. This was a place where doctors, headmasters, upper civil servants, businessmen and so on, would have lived. It had a rural, Victorian feel, quite in keeping as preparation for entering the Osterley demesne wall through a large gate. Once in the transformation was complete. In the 50s and 60s the domination of the whole area by endlessly noisy Heathrow flightpaths was still in the future. Cattle grazed and, if I'm not mistaken, there were deer about. Just outside the demesne, across a small road in couple of fields, was the beginnings of a donkey sanctuary, where a collection of older animals lived. I was a young adult before I ventured into the big house itself.

The other trail out of Southall led, by way of Dormers Wells Road, across the Dormers Wells Estate (still then in asbestos prefab houses, more of that another time) into the golf course and the River Brent which ran through it and then over the Greenford Road into the second part of the golf course up to 'Bunny Park', which was in Hanwell. Bunny Park had a small petting zoo, hence its name and part of the attraction. Plus the River Brent ran down underneath Brunel's huge railway viaduct which offered the willing many challenges. The place between the viaduct and the Uxbridge Road, which faces what is now the Ealing Hospital has long since been groomed, but in my day it was wild and overgrown. You could swing on rope and old tyres out over the river and back and there were places in the golf course where the river's winding path had created small ledges and the water was amenable for paddling. The golf course itself offered the chance of collecting balls from the undergrowth and collecting a bounty at the clubhouse, not much, but enough for a soft drink or sweets. But sometimes children were chased out. There was a pond in a corner of the golf course, quite near the Iron Bridge on the Uxbridge Road, where, if you were prepared to get wet feet or had wellies, you could wade in and collect bullrushes, which seemed quite exotic.

There were other green areas in the Southall area, like the park at the Greenford end of Lady Margaret Road where a donkey derby was held and doubtless some of the animals from the sanctuary got an outing, but these were, in the main, just grassy areas with no special attractions.

Cinemas

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s there were four cinemas in Southall which were very much a hub of social life: The Odeon on the Uxbridge Road, the Gaumont on South Road, the Dominion on the Green and a smaller, more fleapit type of place, called the Gem, which was between the Green and the Station. I used to go to 'Saturday morning pictures' for children, mostly in the Gaumont. Hundreds of us would queue up, pay whatever small amount (it was probably sixpence, the ubiquitous 'tanner') and go in to see some kind of mini-feature, a serial, something like Batman, and I vaguely remember on-stage entertainment of the 'Uncle Bob' variety. Later I went to see 'Rock Around the Clock' in the Gaumont and had to take an adult to get in ... a managed rite of passage. So far as I remember the Gem was an on and off kind of place, I don't remember going there. Today, in a different time and place, something like it might become an arthouse cinema. All three of the others were palaces in the neo-Egyptian or Greco-Roman style, with huge auditoreums, balconies and plush seating. Depending on what was on we would go to any of them and also over to cinemas in Greenford Greenford or Hownslow. There were the usual usherettes with uniforms, trays and torches, very much like a Hopper painting and the rituals in the back rows etc. In the 1960s the Odeon became a bowling alley and the hangout for mods from miles around. Outside was a slip-road on which would be lines of Vespas and Lambrettas, with chrome and arials sporting fur tails.

The Canal

Coming from the direction of Ealing along the Uxbridge Raod the 'legal' boundary of Southall is the River Brent, down the hill from Hanwell. Hanwell had a London postal district address, Southall was in Middlesex - ah, the identity of Middlesex, a whole other question. But really it's further along the Uxbridge Road, where the railway crosses over, at the 'Iron Bridge', where Southall properly begins. Likewise, leaving The Broadway to the west, Southall doesn't legally end for a distance after the canal, but the canal is where it really ends. Southall has always been 'book-ended' by these two grey areas, which contained the Asylum (St Bernard's Hospital or 'the loony bin' as it was known locally) and the bus garage on one side and the R.Woolf Rubber factory on the other, all very important employers.

The Canal that crosses under the Uxbridge Road was still very much in use as a commercial waterway in the 1950s and into the 1960s. I remember barges chugging along with loads and barges tied up on the towpath near the old Hamborough Tavern for overnights. There were large woodyards and sawmills on the Hayes side into which boys could climb to play, trying to avoid the large guard-dogs and their equally large and bellicose caretakers. My friends and I used to swim in the canal, further down by the Rec, where the metal footbridge goes over. The water wasn't clean, that's for sure, I can still remember its petrol- metallic taste and particular smell, but we hadn't heard of Weil's Disease and so on and so far as I know none of us died from it. We would sometimes try to cling to the sides of barges and get a ride in the water, a risky enterprise that would probably have the parents of today freaking. But in those days (mid 50s through to early 60s) kids (working class ones at least) ranged pretty freely around all the interesting places for miles and their parents had little idea what was going on. On the Hayes bank, down in the Greenford direction there were old cuttings off the canal which had derelict barges and tackle where we used to mess around. I remember some of the older kids came there with air guns and sometimes even a .22 rifle. There had been government buildings beyond there in the war and we used to find bullets and other detritus. The Civil Defence had a depot there where they would play war games. I remember a huge fire there when a stockpile of old tyres went up. You could see the column of thick black smoke for miles. There was a Post Office depot there as well. Many's the boy and girl who would find their way along that way in the evening.

It was a pretty wild place, with moorhens and ducks nesting there and things like grass snakes and the occasional adder, as well as being a good place to raid bird's nests for eggs, another activity frowned on now. The canal banks along there were popular fishing places for the locals. You could catch gudgeon no problem, perch not so often, the occasional bream and the even less frequent pike. I think that, officially, you were supposed to have a permit to fish and wardens would very rarely cycle up and down checking. Most people just went and fished. By the 1970s the canal was more or less finished with commercial traffic and the pleasure boat thing had yet to fully take off so I remember it as dormant then.

The Gasworks

Another defining feature of the Southall was the old gasworks. I remember as a boy watching the two or three smaller gasometers going up and down within their frames and looking up at the big one, which seemed to be made out of giant planks and is still there. It used to be possible, up to the middle of the 1960s, to walk into the gate on Beaconsfield Road, cross through the works and walk out into White Street, a tiny street with two terraces of smallish houses, almost completely surrounded by the oppressive gasworks.

I remember the smell of the works, a mixture of coke, various sulphurous fumes, the gas itself, which was sickening, and other less definable chemical fumes. The streets all around the gasworks, on both sides of the railway and between Beaconsfield Road and the Uxbridge Road, were often filled with these smells. The works used to have huge piles of coke and other things around the edges. As a child I climbed in from the canal wall side and climbed on them. If there were security guards they didn't try very hard in those days. My grandfather, who was an engine driver and no stranger to dirty working conditions in the days of steam engines, said that if you worked in the gasworks the smell could never really be washed off.

The Other Side

I had many conversations with my grandparents about Southall. They were first generation Southallians themselves, like most of the people around them, when they were young. My grandfather worked on the Great Western Railway, which had an engine shed in Southall, mainly for local and goods engines. The custom at the time - the early 1900s - was for GWR men to take a 'promotion exam' for fireman or driver at Old Oak sheds (the main London depot) and then be told where they had to go and work. This could be absolutely anywhere on the GWR system from Merseyside to South Wales, or Cornwall to London. My grandparents had about a week to move from Notting Hill to Southall, not too far. But some of the men had to move, complete with families if they had them, from Wales and the Midlands. In this way workers from many places were brought to live in Southall in the pre-war period.

In the very early 1900s the centre of Southall was on the south side of the railway line. The place was still very much Southall-Norwood. The Green and King Street was its shopping area. The railway was always a major defining geographical line. People used to talk about 'over the other side', meaning, the other side of the tracks. This was further complicated at that time by the fact that the Uxbridge Road, the main road into Ealing and London was away from the old centre. Along the Uxbridge Road, up to and after the First World War, could be found orchards and market gardens, as well as some houses. The development of the Uxbridge Road as a shopping area came later. I always felt that the King Street-Featherstone Road part of Southall had a more dense, small town feel. The streets are closer and narrower and the houses often smaller, in the nineteenth century way. This was the remnant core of a small rural Victorian town, grown up at a railway junction and a canal junction.

The Past

I don't live in the past but the past lives in me. Sometimes, for the most obscure of reasons, an image from long ago flashes across my mind. Often a place. For a lot of people the place where they were born and spent their childhood comes to have special emotional, even dreamlike, significance in later life. My childhood place, where I spent the first 20 years of my life, was Southall. As soon as you say the name it asserts its current political and cultural bone fides: an Asian centre; the riot and the target of white racism.

First, let me say I am white, but I am not a racist and I do not intend to contribute to the ongoing racist rant about the changes which have taken place in Southall. Sadly, there are plenty of other opportunities for that on the web. Hell, now you hear complaints by Southall-born Punjabis about Somalis and, no doubt, the Somalis or someone else are are giving out about the latest arrivals - Albanians or whoever.

What is true for me, though, is that, as a white person who grew up in Southall in the 1950s and 1960s and was in or around the area for some of the 1970s, I would find it very hard to find my younger self, or my family, reflected in its new reality - not that that would stop me from getting involved in its newer incarnation. Over the years I had many friends there who came from many places. But it is there that I was born, four generations of my family have lived and, like it or not, it will always be what the Irish call my 'homeplace'. My connection to the past of the place now, like many other white 'moved aways', as well as the shrinking minority of older white people who still live thereabouts, is very much to a past now covered over by the healthy cultural and economic expression of the communities who have lived there since the immigration began in earnest, in the 1960s. The ethnic British (plus Irish and Polish) cultural history of Southall up to, say, 1980, to take an arbitrary point, carried in the memory of those who grew up and lived there, is dispersing and dying.

For many years I was intolerant of the problems faced by my own relatives: working class people who, living in their own place, the place where they had been born and raised, were unable to live their own kind of lives without feeling an increasing sense of difficulty or a sense of displacement. I argued that all this was a product itself of intolerance, xenophobia and narrowness, born of the imperial shadows. I was wrong, the problem is more complex.

There are many innacuracies out there about post-war Southall. Take Wikipedia, for example, which says in its entry on Southall, "1950 was when the first group of Asians arrived in Southall, due to the closeness of Heathrow airport". Perhaps some Asians came in 1950, but very few and the proximity of Heathrow was a marginal factor. Where did Wikipedia get its facts from? Has the person who wrote that any source for it? Have they any idea of the world in 1950? The kind of people who came to work in the R.Woolf Rubber factory, (which was pretty much the first to source labour abroad, and nowhere near as early as 1950 in numbers) could not have afforded a plane ticket, perhaps the Woolf brothers paid for plane tickets but I doubt it. Cheap air trips for ordinary people weren't even a gleam in Freddie Laker's eye in 1950.

The real immigration to the Southall area started only towards the end of the 1950s and included a good proportion of Afro-Caribbean people, who came by boat. Only in the early 1960s did immigrants from the Indian sub-continent come to have numbers sufficient to predominate in one part of Southall - the bit bounded by South Road on one side and Hamborough Road on the other and between the Broadway and Beaconsfield Road - and it was work that brought them. When I was in primary school in the mid-1950s, in Tudor Road, in the heart of what is now the 'Asian' area, there were no more than a few Asian born children. I remember the first south-Asian boy into my secondary school in or around 1962. It took some time for the men who came to work in the factories to be joined by wives and children and longer for Southall born Asians to come on stream.

I also remember, well into the 1960s, pubs like the Beaconsfield Arms and the Three Horseshoes having a strong Afro-Caribbean presence in some bars. The Beaconsfield used to have a tiny bar in the middle, which no doubt was the 'snug' before that, where Caribbean guys used to play dominoes in their own way. Don't forget the contribution that was later to be made to music by Southall based sound systems and groups like Misty in Roots. But, go back further, to the 1950 mentioned in Wikipedia and who were the real immigrants already in Southall or arriving then? They were Polish and Irish and people from Wales and Scotland. The street where I grew up had families like those. What few people from the Sub-Continent and West Indies there were, were living in sporadic rented houses, separated from each other and the predominantly white town. It took a while for groups like the Indian Workers Association to get off the ground and find places for people to socialize. For years - well into the 60s - Indian films were shown only on Sundays in a rented local cinema. Getting permanent places of worship took even longer, shops nearly as long. Even in the mid 1960s the 'Pak Butchers' and shops like it were the exception not the rule.
In 1950 Southall still had something between a suburban and a semi-rural feel. There were fields nearby, the remains of the brickfields and kilns were there in the Hayes direction, there were market gardens as well as many factories and workplaces. In the 1950s employment did not centre on Heathrow, hardly anyone from Southall worked there. You could more or less stroll into the edges of the airport and see planes parked on grass verges; (I did as a boy when I was planespotting). Electric trolleybuses ran up and down the Uxbridge Road - the successors to the trams - and Hillingdon was the local hospital, not the Ealing Hospital, (which was still a playing field behind a high brick wall on the edge of St Bernard's), or the King Edward Hospital in West Ealing which was later to move westwards and become the Ealing Hospital. In the early1950s, in some parts of Southall, houses still had no electricity and street lamps were gas and lit by a lamplighter. I remember them going around on bikes and I remember gaslight in the council house where I lived.

Massive fogs often hung over the place and factory sirens could be heard marking the beginning and end of the working day. Large numbers of people walked and cycled to work with lunch boxes and flasks and white working class allotment culture could be found in various corners, as well as fishing in the canal. Bread was delivered from Fowler's bakery by horsedrawn wagon and George, the travelling greengrocer, used the same means of transport. The football pitches in the various parks and recs were well used at the weekend and a good crowd turned out to watch Southall play in the Athenian League, if they weren't up the road to QPR, Fulham or Brentford.

Despite what my son says I'm not old yet and all this and a lot more lies within my lifetime. This is what I'll try to write about, to bring out of my mind the people, places and moods of the Southall I remember and can never go back to, not only because of time and distance but because the human and cultural landscape has altered so much. I view with interest the cultural commentaries now coming from Asian Southallians-Hownslovians-Haysians about an age when they grew up in the area, really not that long after me.

If there is regret let it be the normal and trivial personal regret of times past and lost, but also, let those of us who come a little longer ago from Southall's past, it's English past, be able to write about it and remember it without the patina of racism.