Scenes from West Ealing and Hanwell

West Ealing has its nicer parts - essentially the higher up the hill you go, more salubrious the street. Below: here's a terrace of solid late-Victorian and early-Edwardian houses on Lynton Avenue as it climbs towards Kingsley Avenue. Tree lined, as a good avenue should be, and plenty of fruit on the rowan tree on the left.

Below: Pitshanger Park, West Ealing, the bowls club's pavilion. Sadly one of the two greens is no longer maintained. Triplets out jogging, or triple exposure?

Down towards Hanwell, a 1964 Morris Minor 1000 stands outside a more modest terrace of houses on Milton Road, part of Hanwell's Poets' Corner, with streets named after famous poets - Shakespeare, Browning, Dryden, Browning and Cowper. My father's first car was just like this, though finished in Smoke Grey. And my first car was the van version, in Trafalgar Blue

Drayton Green station on the Greenford line. The tracks separate West Ealing, London W13, from Hanwell, London W7. Below: on the line is a rubbish train, hauling household waste from Brentford to a landfill site in Lincolnshire. This train runs this way four times a week. The tracks curving off to the left head for West Ealing station.

Left: No.1, Greenford Avenue, under the main line railway bridge between Hanwell and West Ealing stations. A traditional gentlemen's barber, complete with red and white striped barber's pole in the window. This device dates back to the times when barbers also performed surgery; the red denoted the blood, the white denoted a bandage. This shopfront looked like this as long ago as the early 1970s.

Below: signage time. This is the station sign at Hanwell, by the recently re-opened south entrance on Station Approach. The Grade II listed building has several signs in the old style.

Below: a detail of the old Hanwell GPO sorting office, in a similar Office of Works architectural style as the seen in the sorting office in West Ealing. The ER crest on the tympanum within the pediment (just visible) suggests it's an Edwardian rather than Victorian building.

Below: also from the Edwardian era (1901-1910), is this painted door to an electricity junction box just off Cleveland Rd, West Ealing, harking back to the Great Days of the Borough of Ealing, the Queen of the Suburbs, the first to introduce Electroliers to light the streets.

Finally a bonus pic from the City of London, signage from the underground passage linking Monument Station and Eastcheap.

This time last year:
Four years of PiS

This time four years ago:
High Victorian Manchester

This time seven years ago:
The clocks go back - but when should they go forward?

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw's first Metro line is completed