Edgware, Station Road

A Memory of Edgware.

I lived in Edgware between 1959 and 1969, I was only 6 months old when we moved from Harrow. I can remember my mother going into the haberdashery shop called Stanley J Lees, the original Sainsbury's with wooden floors and counters and where they wrapped up the cheese in greaseproof paper, Woolworths, MacFisheries (with their upstairs restaurant), Valentine Brooks the sweet shop, Fine Fare's down by the library, also the furriers in Edgebury Lane which was diagonally opposite the Kosher grocers. I can also remember the wood yard (somewhere around where the Green Shield Stamp building was eventually built) where they used to let me scrabble round the floor and collect bags of sawdust for my guinea pig's cage for no charge. I spent many an hour up the alleyway that led to the sidings of the train station watching the tube trains, it was next to Brill the bakers and I can still smell the bread baking as it was wafted out of the Expelair right by the train buffers. I used to live in The Rise with the Silk Stream running at the bottom of the road, we were often visited in the garden by big brown water rats. My grandparents used to own the house having moved in in around 1936 - they lived there, initially, for three years but the war intervened and they mothballed the house and temporarily moved away, they returned to the house in the late 1940's. My parents bought the house from them in 1959. It was next door to the dentist whose house was situated between The Rise and Hale Lane. My room was the maid's room and had bars on the windows. All the other rooms had a bell system that rang down in the morning room. My father was a scout master somewhere either in Harrow or Edgware. both of my parents and brother ten pin bowled for Middlesex at the newly built bowling alley. My sister was head girl at Edgware School in the mid sixties, I can remember going to prize night and Cliff Richard was giving out the prizes and he sung "congratulations".