This was how the east side of College Road, Handsworth Wood in Birmingham looked on Sunday 29th November 1981. I was in the final year of university, living in the nearby student village. Google Street View reveals that virtually all these shop fronts have been renewed and most of the exposed brickwork seen here has since been rendered. Inevitably, most windows have been replaced. The shop with the blue fascia (about eight doors up) proclaiming "Children First" seems to have survived as "The Children's Society", but all these other businesses appear to have departed. The antiques shop now has forbidding metal shutters and has lost the nearest chimney stack.
A look at Google Street View shows the corner shop as being the "Abhi Meat Centre" in 2019.
Tags: antiques shop College Road Handsworth Wood Birmingham 1981-TR10_34
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On a recent visit to Frome I spotted these mannequin heads modelling wigs. Has the passing gentleman been distracted by the gaze of the coiffured ladies, or by me standing with my camera? Actually, there's more to this than meets the eye: the "Pop-up Gallery", here on Catherine Hill, is an artists' venue that's making temporary use of this otherwise vacant shop. Saturday 31st December 2011.
Tags: Frome Catherine Hill Pop-up Gallery wigs mannequin head coiffure 20111231_1977
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A plethora of signs clustered here at the junction of Church Street and Bridge Street, Whitby. We can go in either direction to reach Whitby Abbey, but only right if we're driving. Thursday 26th August 2010.
Tags: Whitby Signs street furniture Whitby Abbey Yorkshire
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This is a view west along Meadow Street, Weston-super-Mare, at its junction with Orchard Street (if I remember correctly). The close network of streets here, just to the east of the High Street, is I think a visually stimulating part of town with a fascinating variety of shops. That this is a modern photograph is betrayed by the traffic lights, metal shutters, cars, satellite dishes, etc, but otherwise this scene probably hasn't changed that much for a few decades. When I took the photo I didn't even notice the fine tiling that adorns the T-Shirt shop, right. I can't help feeling that the Lock & Key shop itself, its windows full of carefully displayed goods, is of a kind that is becoming increasingly rare in our towns. Saturday 14th April 2012.
Tags: Weston-super-Mare Meadow Street Lock & Key Pentax Spotmatic 1000 Vivitar 28-105mm Kodak T-Max 100 North Somerset UK England 2012
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This is the first of a pair of photographs, shot in 1974, showing former railway stations converted for use as car parks. It goes without saying that I wish this picture had been correctly exposed, so that we could see the full splendour of Glasgow St Enoch's twin curved canopies, but it's the only memento I've got of the brief visit I made to the former terminus of the Glasgow & South Western Railway. This is the best I can do; most likely the camera had been set to the wrong film speed. Whilst it's a failure, one thing is certain: I can't go back and take it again. The station closed for rail traffic in 1966 and was demolished in 1977. Photo taken sometime in July 1974.
Tags: Glasgow St Enoch station G&SWR railway car park terminus 1974
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