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