The Street Where I Was Born

A Memory of Stamford.

This photograph was taken in the year my father was born in the house which is just out of sight at the far left-hand side of the picture (No. 2). I was also born in the same house 33 years later. Most of the buildings shown here are still standing, but the cottage with two windows on the left-hand side had been rebuilt by the time I was born, and since the mid-1960s there has just been a gap there leading into a car park and delivery area.
Half-way down the left-hand side of the street was a butcher's shop, where my mother used to take me when she went shopping. I remember seeing the butcher using his cleaver to separate the chops, slicing off the rashers of bacon on the mechanical slicer, and cutting off lengths of sausages. Further down that side was the dentist's surgery, which has only just (2007) moved out of the same premises.
On the right-hand side past the King's Head was the site of a printing works in a three-storey brick building, where one of the local newspapers was produced in the 1920s. My father tells me how he remembers the wireless reception being disturbed on the evening when the presses were running. You could hear them at both ends of the street. In my day there was a plumber's business in the building. A few doors beyond that was a shoe repairer's shop, and then the doctors' surgery on the corner of St Mary's Street.
On the right-hand side of the King's Head (out of picture) is St Michael's church (standing on the High Street), which used to have the greatest seating capacity of all the churches in the town (there were six parishes); but it was decommissioned in the early 1960s, and the last service held in it was the Stamford School Speech Day service in summer 1966, which I attended (sitting in the gallery) as a junior member of the school. The building still stands, but was converted in the 1980s to three shopping units. While the church was still in use I remember the bells ringing on a Sunday morning - there were just three of them. I believe they have been moved to a church near Ely.
I lived in this street until 1983.