NOSTALGIA

Do you have any recollections or old photographs to share? Send them to Nostalgia, Leicester Mercury, 16 New Walk, Leicester LE1 6TF or email nostalgia@leicestermercury.co.uk

RECEIVING a parking ticket is probably something which most people will not want to remember but one reader still has his ticket from nearly 60 years ago.

Raymond Swinn, of Wigston, sent in his ticket, above, which was issued in August 1960, and the unusual story behind it.

He said: “While I was working at the US airbase at Bruntingthorpe airfield, I had parked my car outside the HQ with two wheels on the tarmacadam and two wheels on the grass.

“Two military policemen came into the HQ where I was working and asked whose car it was.

“When I said mine they took me into the provost marshal’s office. When I asked what I had done wrong, I was told I had parked on the Queen’s grass.

“When I replied that it was my Queen not yours, he sternly replied that if I breached airfield rules again, I would be banned, end of story.”

Our recent photo of Leicester’s desolate Catherine Street Bridge in the early 1970s before it was knocked down, prompted regular correspondent Michael Clarke to get in touch.

Mr Clarke, who lives in Norfolk, sent in this great photo, taken in 1962 by Geoff King, showing what once existed below the west side of the bridge.

He recalled: “Trainspotters would stand on their bike pedals to peer over the bridge to see any action below!” Virtually everything that can be seen in the photo has disappeared in the intervening years.

The streets to the left of the former Great Northern Railway Station on Belgrave Road have been redeveloped, the station itself, after briefly being occupied by Vic Berry’s scrap metal business, has been demolished along with the goods warehouse, right, which became the site of a retail park in the 1980s.