Going To The Shops...

A Memory of Wembley.

As a fully paid up member of the 'Baby Boomer' generation, born in 1947, I've been reading all the stories posted on this lovely website (which - like many others, I suspect - I came across purely by chance). I was born in Perivale Maternity Hospital and lived in Sudbury (and later in North Greenford) until I left the area in 1966, so my memories are very much of Wembley as it was in the mid-50s to mid-60s, when I used to accompany my mother on regular shopping trips to Wembley High Road. After this I used to return during the summer college break and managed to get a series of holiday jobs at the Columbus Dixon works, down Lancelot Road, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which also helped to boost my student grant for the coming academic year.

It's really those earlier years though which I hope will provide the more meaningful and recognisable memories for others. We did of course have more local shops, around Sudbury Hill tube station and further down the Greenford Road. opposite the Oldfield pub, where Mum would usually buy everyday needs, but we still seemed to need to get the 92 bus into Wembley on a regular basis. My mother seemed to have a sort of personal hierarchy of shopping centres; Wembley being the first port of call, with Harrow (or Sopers in particular) visited when she was looking for things like new curtains, and only very occasional trips as far as Ealing (well, Bentalls, really), for more costly items such as furniture. So Wembley it inevitably was, and whilst I found it hard to get excited about venturing into the likes of Killips or Blands - bed linen not holding a great fascination for a young lad - Mum, bless her, always made sure that we called in at Lyons tea rooms (I don't recall that one on the High Road ever being called a 'Corner House', as their larger, central London outlets were). I remember being fascinated by the way the waitresses poured out large quantities of tea; packing all the cups together in a tight little formation on a tray and simply going from one cup to the next with no hesitation. This was in the days when the place used to shake with the vibration from the steam-hauled express trains racing along the railway tracks immediately below the cafe, which seemed quite exciting and faintly dangerous to an impressionable 8-year old.

Others have mentioned Wally Kilmister's model shop up at the Triangle, which of course was quite a hike all the way up from the main part of the High Road, so we didn't get up that far on every trip, but there was another great little toy shop just a few yards down Ealing Road, on the right hand side, which I used to look forward to visiting. They used to have a proper downstairs there, which I always thought was exciting, as you were sort of sealed off from the rest of the world, surrounded by all these goodies. A lot of what they sold there was quite affordable, so we often came away with maybe one of those really bouncy rubber balls, or a bag of marbles. Can anyone remember the name of that shop? (I keep finding the name George Arthur coming into my head, but that could just be a senior moment...)

I think there was a shop on the south side of the High Road called Lawleys, which sold china, crockery and glassware - that was another regular port of call, mainly for replacing broken items rather than splashing out on a new dinner service. I remember a whole range of men's clothing shops, like Burtons, Dunns, John Collier, Hepworths and some others whose name I can't recall. This was of course well before the swinging sixties when such places became overlooked in favour of the new trendy boutiques which found their way into nearly every high street.

If there was a film doing the rounds which my mother deemed suitable for a pre-adolescent youngster, we used to go to either the Majestic or the Regal for an afternoon showing. I always thought it was quite exciting during the winter months when you went in in the daylight and came out into darkness! I think I probably saw the entire series of Norman Wisdom comedies, plus the occasional action adventure like Davy Crockett, which if I recall correctly, set a trend for the wearing of those odd furry hats which our hero wore throughout the film. My last trip to the old Majestic was quite a few years later, when I had a date with a girl who worked at Columbus Dixon with me during the summer holiday. She was a really lovely looking blonde girl (I suspect I was a bit out of my league, really), and I can't remember too much about the film that was showing that evening...

When my mother had finished her sweep of the High Road shops we used to wait for the 92 bus back to Sudbury/Greenford at the stop outside Garners the baker. She used to get really annoyed at how long we sometimes had to wait for a 92 to arrive - I must admit that they weren't exactly one a minute, whereas there were plenty of 18s, plus a whole fleet of 46s, 79s and 83s, which used to turn left down Ealing Road and head off to various exotic locations which were of no use to us! We did, however, now and again venture on to the 662 trolleybus - my Auntie and Uncle lived down Monks Park in Stonebridge Park, so to go and visit them we used to switch buses and trust our safety to one of those electric-powered beasts. What fun (not really) when the conductor poles used to come adrift from the overhead wires, and you had to wait for a man with a very long wooden pole to come along to get you hooked back up again. All this was in the days when you used to be given a proper ticket by the conductor, plucked from a multi-coloured selection stored in a sort of long block of wood carried around the conductor's waist and then clipped (I've actually still got a selection of these garnered from trips around west London (or Middlesex, as it was correctly called then), which I've had mounted in a frame, as a sort of instant reminder of one aspect of my childhood. Eventually, technology moved on and you had to make do with a rather boring slip of paper which the conductor used to produce by turning a little handle on the side of his ticket-issuing machine. At my school a rumour used to go round that if the four-digit number on your ticket added up to twenty-one you were entitled to claim a kiss if the conductor happened to be female - I never knew anyone who dared to put this wild rumour to the test, needless to say...

I always remember Wembley High Road as being quite lively and enjoyable to be in - one place that my mother warned me off was the Railway pub, on the corner of Ealing Road. When you walked past there was inevitably a blast of beer- and cigarette smoke-laden air which hit you. I don't know whether she imagined that I might develop a hankering to venture inside, even at my tender age, but I never did, even in later years. I don't even know if it's still going as a 'traditional' pub - maybe I should go back one of these days and see...