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.