I Was Born Close To The Station In 1953

A Memory of Addlestone.

I was born above Beston's Stationers' shop, Station Road in 1953. The shop is on the left hand side close to the crossing gate and the bus stop was outside.

I attended St Augustine's C of E Primary School from 1957 to about 1960 when we moved to New Haw where I attended the old Primary School, long gone now, in Woodham Lane.

I can still remember living there and the small Fire Station at the bottom of the garden which still had a war time type claxon on the roof that would sometimes make that sound made during air raids?!

I can still remember standing on the bridge over the railway as a steam train passed underneath and smoke bellowed all around me. I remember too the coal office in the station yard where my mother worked for a while. There was a shop called Exchange & Mart just before the crossing gates too.

The flat above the shop, which we rented, had no indoor toilet and no bathroom so it was an outside toilet and tin bath for me as a kid. When we moved to Parkside, New Haw, into a semi detached council house with a bathroom and inside toilet it was like moving to a palace. Fond memories all the same and much more simple times too.