Lost London

London is probably one of the most written about cities in the world, but for many parts of old London there is no record of how some streets looked in the past.  Even in the centre of the city and the more famous areas there are no records of what they used to look like.  If this is true of the well known  parts of London, how much more so is it the case with the more remote or what had been the less salubrious parts.  Working class east end is recorded as images of the people and "typical" slums, but the streets themselves are rarely shown or named.

A short list of the streets I am interested in will give an example.

For West Street Soho (or Seven Dials)  before the building of the St. Martins and Ambassador theatres there is no response for images in a search engine.  So what was it like before? Were the buildings at the end of the street demolished to make way for these theatres or were they converted?.  What used to be the West Street Chapel; is still there but were all the buildings like that or was it a mish mash of different heights and sizes?  We should be able to tell that but we cannot because there appears to be no description of the road visually or textually.

The Old Street end of City Road, Finsbury does not appear to have been caught on camera before the war time bombing disposed of it.

The tenement buildings in Manston Street, Bethnal Green did not succumb to the bombs but went by way of the demolishers to make make way for new buildings, but no one recorded them before they came down.

Small back streets all over from east to west, north to south have disapeared with no record of them apart from on old survey maps to show that they were there, or perhaps as a coloured mark on Booth's Poverty Map.

Too late now.

Not a stunt rider

No this  is not a stunt rider.  This manoeuvre was part of the normal motorcycle training for National Service Military Policemen in the 1950s.

The first week of training was spent in a field at Aldershot learning to control the bike before we were allowed out on the road.  First day just going round and round the field trying not to fall off for those who had never ridden a bike before. But of course the first thing was to learn how to kickstart the damn thing without the kickback breaking your leg.

 During the week we progressed in our control  of the bike by standing on the seat and the rear pannier, sitting side-saddle and sitting on the petrol tank with our legs over the handlebars. This was before we were even allowed to move out of first gear! Needless to say, the bikes had to be cleaned at the end of every day before the evening meal.

By the end  of the week we were regarded as being competent enough to be allowed out on the road.

This was not always the case, because in reality we had not learned any roadcraft nor properly when it was appropriate to change gear. Of course it all came together with practice, riding every day for quite long periods in different traffic conditions.

One of the highlights of about the third week was a day spent doing cross country riding  at a scrambling track.  This was quite competitive and it was the first time that we were encouraged to go as fast as we could. 

Once having completed the motorcycle section of our course we then went on to the much less exciting business of learning to drive a 15cwt truck.  How boring by comparison.