Ilford, High Road 1966

Sally Lunn Restaurant, Cranbrook Road

Does anyone remember the Sally Lunn Restaurant in the Cranbrook Road? It used to be next door to Russells Garden Nursery that later became the Prudential Offices, at the time one of Ilford's tallest buildings

I remember

I was born in Ilford in 1961, in Stanley Road, opposite the cemetery of St Mary the Virgin! I remember well shopping trips 'Up Ilford' with Mum or Dad as a child. I remember too, going into C&A for clothes, and visiting the Clarkes shoe shop, down a side road, I believe it was near the Town Hall, there was a tank of fish in the shop. Does any one else recall the Nativity that appeared on the Town Hall steps each Christmas? I used to walk past the Ilford Palais on a Saturday when all the 'big boys and girls' (probally all of 13 or 14) were queued up, vowing that one day when I was big I would be going there on Saturday afternoons! (I moved from Ilford just before I was 13, so never got there!) What else, the Unigate Milk depot. The Pioneer Market, where Dad and I brought Saturday night sweets. Mum worked for a while at the bakers stall there and used to bring home mini Hovis loaves. The record stall at the end of the market. I brought my first Top of the Pops LP there!

i was one years of age in 1965

Good static shot, black & white (b&w), no doubt Ilford film, the best b&w in the world. I was 1 years of age having been born in 1964 about two or three roads away from where this shot was taken, it's Ilford High Road. I was born opposite the Ilford Pali which was opposite Lynton House, the redbridge council offices, next door to the Inigate milk factory where Mr and Mrs Richingson lived who gave me some comics which I should have kept longer than I did, God only knows how much they would be worth now. Boag Boag, a name for a kind of security guard on the look out, a nosey parker which was a good thing in thoses days. I was born and bred for the first 12 years of my life at the same address, where I was born in a house, no 1, I would stay until I moved on my 12th birthday in 1976 a Sunday, I was born on a Saturday ('Saturday's child works hard for his pay').
The times I have been in the town hall for gang shows with the Cubs, and to eturn my library books. So I am aware of this scene from my childhood. I went to Cleveland Infants and Junior School from about 1969 untill 1976 when I went to Dane Junior High, a very good school, for 6 weeks until Mum who worked for the council moved us to Wanstead Park Road because of the building of the roundabout and link-up road or whatever they called it, basically they knocked down the house I was born in and the road to make way for the new road and everyone had to be rehoused. Mum would not let us leave until she got what she wanted, which was a better house in Wanstead Park Road, where I spent my teenage years trying to grow up. So this shot is great for me because I am reminded of my birth town just after I was born and as it would have looked when I first began to walk and started listening to Sammy Davis Junior records because my dad was convinced that big Frank (I'm dyslexic) was GOD himself had collected.

Ron's Music Shop and Redbridge Photographic

The former Ron Pakeham (spelling?) owned one of the stores in Pioneer Market and sub-let half (and eventually all) that store to Redbridge Photographic, where I worked some evenings and Saturdays whilst at school and later college. The manager was Val Goldstein, who knew everyone in the trade! Chick ran the musical instruments side for Ron, and was a real character who enjoyed liquid refreshment... High points were a certain old gentleman called Frank Fl**ker who used to come in and buy the 'risque' 8mm shorts from David Hamilton, which were so tame by today's standards even the vicar would not blush, and a weird guy who dressed up in half of a truly ancient cinema commissionaire's uniform and claimed he had been in the Mounties which is why he had defaulted on his camera loan.

Ron sadly died but Redbridge soldiered on until the new traffic layout was instituted (late 1970s?) and much of the area redeveloped. I returned a couple of years ago (I now live on the Pacific West Coast of the USA) and recognised - nothing! I even got lost walking around. Oh dear, oh dear....