1963...

A Memory of Putney.

Was the year my family moved from Acton to Earldom Road, Putney, where we lived at number 10 (cost £5500 in 1963!). I have so many memories that I really don't know where to begin! The rag and bone man and his ancient horse trundling up our street, the shops in Lacy Road-especially the wonderfully ornate tiled facia of the fragrant fishmonger where I was sent on Saturdays to buy fish for our cat, the strange junk shop with its fascinating 'perpetual motion' thing in the window, the shop which sold stamps, and where I spent my pocket money on old comics, Bob Kerr's music shop in Felsham Road, the wonderful smell of roasting coffee from the shop by Putney station, Sainsbury's with its sawdust-covered floor and no self-service (!), long summer days playing on the common with my friends (I wonder if my football is still on the church roof!), hearing and feeling the rumble of heavy goods trains passing in the night as I lay in bed, the smell of coal fires on frosty evenings...

My first 'real' girlfriend's family lived off Putney Hill in a vast, rambling and apparently un-modernised Victorian villa, and school friends lived variously in Wymond Street and one of the newer blocks of flats along Putney Hill. I went to school at Emanuel on Battersea Rise and the 37 bus took me there, unwillingly.
As I grew and the Airfix kits I bought from the model shop on Lower Richmond Road were discarded, I would frequent, and occasionally serve in, the Bricklayer's Arms, a scruffy, nicotine stained and generally grubby pub run by Bob Worrall and his charming wife, with old sewing machine tables and wooden benches lining the walls. That was the haunt of the local villains and hippies-a strange mix which somehow worked harmoniously.

I moved away from London in 1980 with my own young family to settle in Devon, but I still harbour fond memories of the Putney I loved in the 1960s. I visited again recently but it has changed almost beyond recognition, and not for the better. Progress?