On the border 3: Selwyn in Shepherd’s Bush, 1971

We’ve moved right over the border this week, into the Borough of Hammersmith, as it was known in 1971. These pictures are a continuation of Bernard Selwyn’s work on the post-industrial  locations near the old Latimer Road and the St Ann’s Road area. It was natural for him to cross the West Cross Route and take a look around Shepherd’s Bush Green, and quite natural for me to follow him. The borders of London boroughs are set on maps but not always so distinct in the minds of people on the ground, as our excursions into Paddington have shown. Or I could just say that I liked the pictures, and wanted to show them.

As in a previous post, the originals are colour photos in a tiny format which nevertheless have survived the forty or so years since they were taken in good condition. Here are a couple showing the roundabout between Holland Park Avenue and Shepherd’s Bush Green.

A quiet moment on the roundabout.Was traffic actually this light in 1971?

Above, the towers of the Edward Woods Estate, which was and is in Hammersmith, although most of the roundabout is in Kensington and Chelsea.

There you glimpse a low slung car in an unflattering orange colour. I won’t ask anyone to try and identify it. And a Routemaster bus. We’ll look at that white building later.

Below, a woman in black trudges eastwards. See comment – I’ve amended her gender)

Below, a better view of that foot bridge over the light stream of traffic.

On the north side of the Uxbridge Road was a public house – The Mail Coach

And the building beside it.

In 1971 Kelly’s street directory lists it as the home of Sage CDO Ltd, an industrial holding company but it had formerly been the surviving entrance to the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. A little more on that later.

Below you can see the modest entrance to Shepherd’s Bush tube station.

And, from the other side of the foot bridge, a closer look at the temporary looking structure. I’m outside my area of local knowledge here so I’d be happy for any residents of Hammersmith and Fulham to tell us how long the bridge lasted. I wouldn’t trust my personal recollections but I don’t remember it being there in the 1990s. (Later: but it was – see postscript).

Below, another lone passer by on those quiet 70s streets. You can just glimpse the towers of the Sage building in the distance, truncated after their glory days.

On the same side of the road was a relatively new shopping centre.

Note the branch of Liptons, a now defunct supermarket chain, and some brightly decorated To Let notices on a vacant shopfront. More of those below. (The Liptons company was started by Thomas Lipton who was also the founder of the tea company of the same same. Liptons were part of a group called Allied Suppliers. Many of their stores were re-branded as Presto,a name some of you will remember. Allied merged with the UK arm of the American chain Safeway. Many former Safeway stores are now owned by Morrisons, to bring the story up to date.)

A bit of a throng down there if you select the right angle as in the picture below. This secluded arrangement was typical of the period. Some Chelsea readers will remember the small enclave on the King’s Road opposite Royal Avenue where branches of Boots and Sainsbury’s sat in their own little precinct (with a piece of civic sculpture?)

If we turn back towards Kensington we can now have a look behind the Sage building.

As you can see, a series of large sheds extended back from the former exhibition entrance. Selwyn might have taken these pictures from his vantage point in the North Kensington residential tower block Frinstead House. He seems to have been interested in these connecting structures, which we saw in the previous On the Border post

They carried on through the railway lands, leading to the exhibition site and later to the White City Stadium, which is visible below.

Much of this area has been redeveloped now, and the Westfield Shopping Centre covers most of the ground up to those two redbrick buildings with sloping roofs you can see in the centre of the picture. They were engine sheds, which survive now as bus garages.

I was intrigued by the long sheds when I first saw them in Selwyn’s pictures. I’ve been told that they were used by a number of companies for a variety of purposes, as they had lots of space for displays. I think they also appear as a sinister location in Nicholas Royle’s novel the Director’s Cut. (Not quite a candidate for my Fiction in Kensington and Chelsea series of posts)

We can go back to Kensington now. Although this week’s post has taken us out of our core area of interest I felt impelled to present these pictures for you. They’re a continuation of Selwyn’s journey but also a glimpse into the full colour of 1971, on a sunny day in May when the past didn’t look quite as grim as black and white images sometimes make it appear.

Below, we can see the area at the south of Norland Road where a foot subway has cut away the end of the street. That cryptic tower structure may be some kind of access point for the infrastructure below. (The London Ring Main later passed underneath here) And those two young women dressed in white are also typical of the optimistic 70s.

 

Postscript

I hope you liked our short excursion westwards. In Kensington and Chelsea we’re never far from one border or another. As with other pictures from this period, many of the buildings in the pictures are now gone. I’m looking at another Selwyn based post in the near future but that one will be well inside Kensington. Thanks once again to Maggie T.

Postscript to the postscript

Thursday lunchtime. @cfcaway sent this amazing picture showing the foot bridge in the 90s:

Thanks for that.