Friday 19 October 2018

Ealing - West Ealing - memories and reality

"Me, I walk home on the same dirty streets where I was born", sang Bruce Springsteen in his song Used Cars on his album Nebraska. What's changed since the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing up round West Ealing? Some things change, some things are the same. The timber merchant on the Uxbridge Road is as it was; the offices above offer new services such as DNA tests.


Below: Jacob's Ladder - I remember steam trains rushing under this footbridge, suddenly enveloped in damp fog as my mother and I would cross over, on our way to my nursery school on The Avenue. Today, a new GWR Hitachi Class 800 IET hurtles through from Cheltenham to Paddington.


On my way home from Gunnersbury Grammar school in the early 1970s, my journey would begin with a walk from school to catch the District Line back to Ealing Broadway. Same station, new platform furniture.


Below: the intermediate station along the route, Ealing Common, still looking as it did in the 1930s, when Charles Holden's architecture was modernising the outer fringes of the London Underground.


Below: I look down and paff a powerful flashback to childhood. On the corner of the Uxbridge Road and Hartington Road - Daniel's department store, beds, prams, that sort of thing - back in the 1990s I was surprised it had survived as long as it did - it's still in business today. The texture of reality.


When seeking those flashback memories in the future, I will be met by a mix of immediate familiarity and the out-of-place; a newness that defies expectation and the closeness of old memories.

This time four years ago:
The autumn sublime in Jeziorki

This time five years ago:
Enduring Ealing - Victorian and Edwardian klimats

This time six years ago:
Krokowa, Poland's former northern borderlands

This time 11 years ago:
Aerial photograph of Central London

2 comments:

adthelad said...

ACTION TOWN??

Very odd! A typo by the sign makers? A bit of creative advertising? Or perhaps a bit of photoshop creativity?

Best, A

Michael Dembinski said...

@adthelad

In London Underground slang, Acton Town is known as Action Town, on account of its busy depot. Oxford Circus is known as Oxford Workhouse for the same reason (minus depot of course!)

I would like to see W-wa Służewiec renamed W-wa Mordor :-)