Readers identify sites from archive
LOOKING BACKERS were treat to a host of old photos from the Echo scrapbooks over the festive break and several readers have been in touch after they recognised the familiar scenes.
The photos included everything from a famous Loughborough coach works to a dog show and an old quarry.
Most of the photos appeared to be from the 1920/30s, with a few dating back to the Great War.
The photos were glued into the scrapbooks, with only the occasional hand-written caption beside them, so the locations and people in them are often a mystery.
Who took the trouble to put them in the books is also a mystery, and it is thought that it could have been the Echo’s second editor Charlie Harriss, or it may have even been William Arthur Deakin, the son of the Echo founder, Joseph Deakin.
Regular reader Mike Jones got in touch and said he recognised a few photos, and said that one of them was the junction of King Street and Great Central Road.
He said: “The area in the foreground now has a dwarf wall round it with a crown in the centre and is known to the locals as the Coronation Gardens, celebrating as it does, the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953.
“When I was a youngster, in the 1940s, the area was surrounded by tall advertisement hoardings, but the photograph was obviously taken prior to the erection of these, probably during the 1930s.
“In the distance to the right can be seen the Central Station on top of the hill and, to the left, the bend in the remaining terraced houses on King Street.”
John Bennett from Loughborough also said that the same photo with the Dennis bus, was Great Central Road on the right and King Street on the left.
Speaking about the photo of a railway bridge, John said that it was the platform of the Midland Railway Station, looking south under the Nottingham Road railway bridge.
He also said that looking beyond the first bridge you can see the bridge that would have carried trains over the main line and that was in fact replaced just last year.
John also said that the photo with the three buses outside was the Willowbrook factory in Derby Road, Loughborough,
He said this is now the site of Willowbrook Park (think The Range, Pets at Home, Maplins, Halfords, B&M).
He said: “The buses were Daimlers (CP6 model) for Luton Corporation and were supplied in September 1933. The seating layout was unusual as there was a gangway down each side of the body upstairs, with rows of seats in between to seat 26 people in total.
“Downstairs were also 26 seats. Willowbrook supplied almost all of Luton’s buses in the 1930s.”
Snapped in all its glory was also the original Loughborough Workhouse, close to the junction of Nottingham Road with the Coneries, and Mike Jones spotted this and another reader said that his mother used to own a greengrocers opposite the factory when it later became Edwin Cooke’s Star Foundry.
Ron Baker, 83, of Nanpantan Road, Loughborough said that his mother’s shop was on Nottingham Road, and was called Baker’s greengrocers - and that his family had another greengrocers in Churchgate.
He said that he remembers the foundry opposite used to carry out ironworks, and that there was a house at the side of factory.
The family that owned the factory lived in that house according to Ron, and he said that when he worked in the shop he would deliver fruit and vegetables to two women - who he thinks were the cook and cleaner for the owners of the factory.
Mike Jones said that the that the buildings are now long gone and the site has, for many years, been occupied by the Royal Mail delivery and sorting office.
HE said: “The workhouse use ceased, following the building of the new Loughborough Union workhouse on Regent Street in 1839 and the site was taken over around 1870 by Edwin Cooke’s Star Foundry.
“By the 1950s the site was being used by the Noel Page Mineral Water company, which was, to my knowledge, the last use before the area was redeveloped, around the 1970s, for the delivery/sorting office.”
Do you remember any of the places mentioned? Please contact Liam Coleman on 01509 635806 or email liam.coleman@trinitymirror.com