North Acton, Victoria Road, Phillips Mapmakers

A Memory of Acton.

Does anyone else remember Phillips the Mapmakers in Victoria Road, North Action? I started there straight from school as a trainee (cartographer). I was only there 6 months before the bright lights and higher wages of banking lured me away (fool that I was), but I remember the factory well - the clocking on and off, the room of light tables I worked in and the aged spinster in charge, the lithography department, the factory in general and all the attendant smells, and the canteen in a wooden construction with a corrugated tin roof, hard up by the railway. I remember a flood during extremely heavy rain, in the road where it went under the railway bridge. I have looked on Google Earth and I am not sure if the building currently on the site is the actual one there when it was Phillips - the Google pics show it as empty and for let but it could be the same one, and when did Phillips shut down? The outbuildings and canteen have long gone! I caught the train from Hounslow West (when it was still the terminus) to North Acton (with a change of line at Acton Town and Ealing Broadway) and walked from North Acton station up the Victoria Road to the Phillips site. It seems quite a hike in retrospect but I don't recall it taking all that long to do the trip. Happy days!

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