Shops And Places The High Road And Ealing Road.

A Memory of Wembley.

I was born and lived in Wembley until 1960. The Railway Hotel was the pub on the corner of Ealing Road and my mother was head housekeeper there for a long time. On the day of the Coronation the pub was allowed longer opening hours and my mum had to work so my sister and I slept at the pub on the night. I can remember hearing the revellers in the street below singing and dancing well into the night. Every year we also went up to the High Road to wave to the Queen as she drove to the stadium for the FA Cup. A little way down the Ealing Road, very close to Demarco's Ice cream shop, was a dry cleaners and laundry. In the window sat a lady at a very complicated looking machine where she repaired stockings! In those days stockings laddered and as they weren't cheap people had their ladders repaired. On the other side of the road immediately next to The Railway Hotel was a sweet shop where I was allowed to spend my pocket money and then a couple of shops further down was the fabric shop of Sybil and Norman? I remember my mother shopping for fabric there as she made all of our clothes. Round the corner in the High Road was the grocery shop of Foster & Williams where you got tin tokens as a 'divi' towards further purchases. Close by was Sainsbury's where currants and raisins were weighed out into blue paper bags and you picked your bacon by indicating which pile you wanted and the assistant would count out how many rashers you needed., Of course there was Killips an interesting shop with the gallery around the upper floor and further along the High Road was Blands. I started going to school in Park Lane but then we moved to Alperton and I went on to Lyon Park. There was a timber yard in Stanley Avenue, down an alleyway behind the houses on the St James Church side. I remember going there with dad and the wood smell was amazing. The Chequers has been pulled down now and replaced by shops but there was a lovely assortment of shops down the old Ealing Road, an Express dairy where my teacher bought her yoghurts! That was a strange food in the 1950's but look at it now. Station Grove, the Iron Bridge, One Tree Hill, Barham Park all names that bring the memories flooding back.