More Early Days In Colindale

A Memory of Colindale.

Life in Sheaveshill Avenue in the early to middle 1950's still seemed to me to be quite rural and as I recall we still had gas lit street lamps - or at least electric lamps using the old standards. The milk was delivered by the Express Dairy horse-drawn milk floats and even the 'rag & bone' man used a horse-drawn cart for his scrap metal and other unwanted items.
Colindale Park was of course our proper playground although unlike the Police College play area we did not have a nice shiny metal slide, only swings, see-saws and a rather dubious sand-pit. For a change then we used to occasionally visit the slide - with pieces of old candles to rub on the metal surface for extra speed! - until we were chased away by an adult who knew that we were 'foreigners'.
The grass covered air raid shelters, semi-buried in a long line in the park, provided ideal grandstands for the obligatory summer-time cricket matches and doubled up as 'BMX' type runs for our bikes from the top end near the park keepers hut down to the water fountain at the end of Sheaveshill Avenue. All now gone of course even the wire fence and gates which were locked at night to keep us out but which presented only a minor challenge to surmount if we wanted to finish playing.
The opposite direction in Sheaveshill Avenue from the park took you up the hill to the Edgware Road and its shops, a journey performed on foot probably more than once a week to get supplies, as like most of our neighbours we did not then have motor transport.
I can picture the layout of the shops but can only recall Shines the Butchers and A B Thomas the Chemist, where in later years I would get my films developed. The Neptune fish bar was a regular stopping point on the way home after visiting the Odeon cinema or the Savoy in Burnt Oak and I seem to remember Goulds, at the Hendon end of the shops, as the place where you got all your school uniforms.
Towards the end of the 1950's and into the 1960's the trolley buses were still running up the Edgware Road and I can remember in 1957 using the Route 665 and 666 buses to go to Spur Road at the northern end of the line and to the newly-opened Secondary Modern school. That was a superb school with dedicated staff and many, many friends made during my time there - but that is another saga in its own right!
When the trolley buses were eventually taken out of service and scrapped, at the rear of the Colindale bus garage on the Edgware Road, we found it quite possible - although highly undesirable - to access the lines of buses and play on them learning to drive- even if they never moved. The You Tube site has a short film of the scrapping of these buses at Colindale which is most interesting, but I know we were there first!

The swimmimg pool in Goldsmiths Avenue is another location with some great memories; long, hot Summer days, a packed pool both in and out of the water, ice creams and just you and your friends - including girl friends if you were that lucky - having a wonderful time with not a care in the world - those were the days.