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.