Bromley High Street

A Memory of Bromley.

I remember the coffee smell as one wandered up the high street. Someone on this memory board has asked what was it called. It was called: Coffee Importers, because that was what they did. You could buy beans or have them ground there and then, or buy the packets ready ground, or even have your own preferred blends. A favourite blend of a friend of mine was Moccha & Mysore. I thought it the height of chic!

A wonderful place for me was the Library, by the park gates. I think it was a Carnegie library, beautiful red and white brickwork and rounded stone corners. I rode in on my bike most Saturdays (from Farnborough) in the late 1950s (as a teenager) and throughout the early 1960s (until I moved to London). I remember the bare wooden floors, the smell of polish, the hard bright lights and the high bookcases of books. It was always so quiet in there you could hear the crepe soles of your sandals squeaking on the polished boards.

We used to sail home-made boats on the ponds in the Library Gardens and sometimes have an ice cream - a rare treat. We'd also listen to a band if one was playing. Everything seemed so leisurely then.

I loved Medhurst's (the site where H.G.Wells was born, I think, there used to be a blue plaque above one of the entrances) and Dunns, built on the bombed site on the north side of the Market Square. I remember the narrow pavement with the wire netting in front of Dunns before it was built. You used to wait for a bus there and the bomb crater was barely a yard from the kerb, with a vertical drop. No Health & Safety then! We kids always worried the netting would collapse and we'd fall in the deep hole. I still have a jacket I made from fabric purchased from Dunns in the early 1960s - really upholstery fabric, but it made a fabulous boxy jacket (Jacqueline Kennedy style). I still have much of the first china set I bought in Medhurst's in 1962: Midwinter, designed by the Marquis of Queensbury. It's still considered a 'whacky' design by family and friends! I also remember Attwoods, going towards Bromley South Station from the High Street, on the same side.

My brother, sister and I all bought our bikes from GW Palmers, the cycle shop at the bottom of Mason's Hill, before you came up the High Street.

One day at the end of the 1950s a bee got entangled in my hair and I put my hand up to brush it out (not realising what it was) and was stung on the hand. My mother rushed me to Boots, up past the library, and the pharmacist treated the sting for free.

So many memories
Susan Tebby