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.