Visits To Canvey Island

A Memory of Hadleigh.

As a family, we used to visit Canvey quite often during the summers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and getting onto Canvey from the A13 was quite stressful in those days, you had to turn at the Tarpots and follow the High Road all the way to the High Street, which meant queuing all the way, until you crossed at the level crossing at Benfleet station. This could be quite a while, as the excursion trains through to Southend meant the level crossing gates kept coming down, holding up all the traffic. I know that when the underpass was built later on in the 1960s, it made the journey a lot faster. We then used to proceed to the seafront, where parking was allowed on what are the Millennium Gardens now in Furtherwick Road. It used to be packed, so when I bought a motorcycle in 1959, my wife and I (she was my girlfriend then) used to go off first with a small tent (used for changing in), get parked, put up the tent so when my dad and mum with the rest of the family followed in the car, we had a space for them to park in. Of course to do this you had to be near the front of the car park so they could turn in. We would have a picnic with us, go for a swim, carefully avoiding the debris from the sewer outfall, and after have a walk round the fairground, with hotdogs or chips, and perhaps have a go at bingo and if lucky win a prize. The only thing then was to get off the Island which was almost as bad as getting on. Thing was Canvey was the nearest seaside resort to Dagenham, and was very popular, always packed in those days. I now live on Canvey, and often hear people moaning about needing another road off the Island. We do need this, but thank God we don't have that 1950s' journey now, or there really would be something to have a moan about.

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