Rushden Images Part 2
The photographs on this page were taken on 1st and 2nd January 2005. I decided to take them in black and white to provide a historical feel to them, having been influenced by Peter Butler's collection of photographs in his book "Rushden in the 1970s". Looking back on the eleven years since I left Rushden, several things strike me after taking these photographs: how little you notice change when you live in a town continuously, how many old shoe factories and pubs have been recycled, and how much the car has come to dominate. Whilst I find it sad that Rushden has lost several pubs (and that the character of many of the remaining pubs has been changed irreversibly), I am pleased at least that the buildings remain for residential use, especially the Waggon & Horses, my former youthful stamping ground, and The Unicorn, ever the archetypal, but latterly unprofitable, backstreet pub. The final thing that struck me is the social mobility of my generation; unlike most of my parents and grandparents' generation, none of my ten cousins live in Rushden at the present time.
Whether or not you still live in the town, I hope these photos stir some memories for you and I plan to make this an ongoing project for when I am in Rushden. I thought it apposite to include a passage from H.E. Bates' "Love for Lydia" below which, although first published in 1952 and reflecting the 1920s era, is particularly evocative of my childhood and teenage years in 1970s and 80s Rushden. The passage "Odours of burning leather ... after waste had stoked the fires" reminds me of my grandfather, an outworker for a bootmaker in later life, burning the leather offcuts on the open fire. If you are from Rushden from my generation or before, you will easily recognise the places in the fictional Evensford, a world of "back jetties lined by gas-tarred fences and other factories":
"The town had grown swiftly from a long stone street and eight hundred people and an open brook in 1820 to a place of fifty boot factories, ten chapels, a staunch Liberalism and ten thousand people in 1880; and a town of Rotarian and Masonic circles, many gleaming fish-and-chip shops and a public library, of golf clubs and evening classes, of amateur operatics on winter evenings and sacred concerts on Sunday afternoons, in 1929. Long rows of bright red brick, or houses roofed with slate shining like steel, had rapidly eaten their way beyond the shabby confines of what had been a village, beyond new railway tracks and gas works, obliterating pleasant outlying farms and hedgerows of hawthorn and wild rose, to stop only where the river-valley took its steep dip to wide flat meadows that were crowned in turn by the iron-ore furnaces I could see flaring at night along the escarpment beyond. Gauntly, in a few generations, a valley-side had been transformed; a sky line of factory chimneys and railway viaducts, gasometers and chapel cupolas, temperance hotels and bus depots had marched in, replacing old horizons of cornstack and farm and elm. Continually new roofs spawned along clay hillsides, encrusting new land, settling down on the landscape in a year or two with the greyness of old ash-heaps under rain.
In the centre of all this the Aspen house stood in a circle of land diametrically split by great avenues of lime and chestnut and elm. The town had been kept away from it by the barricade of a stone wall a mile long and a perimeter of great trees. Outside the barrier men crawled with despondence into and fled with a sort of hungry distraction out of opaque-window factories and their dark bloom of leather dust. Odours of burning leather hung on all Evensford streets, in puthering clouds, on windless afternoons, after waste had stoked the fires."
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| High Street | Skinner's Hill | |
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| High Street | High Street | |
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| High Street | Rectory Road | |
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| The Lightstrung | Church Street | |
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| War memorial & Peter Crisps | Fitzwilliam Hill | |
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| St. Mary's Church | Old shoe factory in East Grove | |
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| Rushden station | View from Station Approach towards Midland Road | |
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| Rushden station looking towards Higham | Rilton Hotel (formerly Queen Victoria Hotel) | |
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| Waggon & Horses, High Street South | Waggon & Horses sign | |
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| The Compasses, Bedford Road | Little Street | |
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| Formerly 'The Unicorn', Grove Road | Formerly the Ritz cinema, College Street | |
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| Birthplace of H.E. Bates, Grove Road | Steps to platform, railway station | |
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| Commemorative plaque, Grove Road | Park Road Baptist Church | |
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| Winchester Road | Newton Road School | |
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| "Back jetties ... and other factories", York Road | Spiritualist Church, Moor Road | |
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| Old Fire Station, Athletic Club, Newton Road | South Close (Albion Place), looking towards Wymington Road | |
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| Old South End school | 'Prestige Footwear', Washbrook Road | |
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| Moor Road | J.H. May, Electrical Contractors, Moor Road/Station Road | |
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| Station Road | Hayway School | |
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| 30 Moor Road | 'TOC H', corner of Portland Road and Rectory Road |
Last edited 15/02/2005 21:45