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.