Picture of the week

HERE’S one taken on this day (assuming you’re reading BT on the day it comes out) – October 13 – back in 1948.

If you weren’t around at the time you’d probably have a fair bit of trouble in identifying this spot now as everything has changed so much, but it was taken in a location which everyone knows.

There are a few clues. You probably can’t read it, but the street sign just to the left of the CHEMISTS sign says Lower Union Street. Over to the right of the picture is a slightly blurred man in a fancy uniform – and another dressed similarly at the very right edge.

He’s not a soldier, but a commissionaire, and he works for the Odeon cinema. Lower Union Street is nowadays just the lower part of Union Street and we’re on Nelson Street looking along Boradmead. The same view nowadays would have the Tesco store and, further along, Marks & Spencer to the left of the picture.

And the Post photographer hadn’t wandered far from the paper’s offices, which back then were in Silver Street, just a few yards away.

It was three years after the war’s end, and seven years since bombs had fallen on the Broadmead area in any number, but the damage and the gaps left by lost buildings is visible everywhere.

Almost everything in the picture would be gone in less than ten years as Bristol’s clean new shopping centre was built. The Odeon lives on, though the cinema occupies far less of the building – much of which is the H&M clothing retailer – nowadays.