Woodside

The various shops you could find in Woodside, tin games and supplies for model aeroplanes. 

In this audio you can hear Anonymous. 

The audio is 3 minutes and 6 seconds long.

Audio Transcript: 

There was a United Dairies shop. So, it was basically a grocery. And it always had one of those windows displays that was full of tins and packets and mostly tins, I think and bottles and stuff. And I can remember [laughs] a friend of mine and I when we were going home from school, which was very close, we are talking about junior school now, we used to…because all these tins in the window all had prices on them, and we invented a game which…which meant that it was a kind of ‘I Spy’ game. And I can’t remember how it worked, but it did involve looking at all the tins…[laughs]…all the tins in the window, and working out which one the other person had, I spied [laughs]. 

Oh, the bank does remain in my memory. There was a branch of the NatWest and I opened my first ever bank account at that branch at the age of 16, I think. And the bank manager was friendly and all the rest of it because my parents used to use that bank for the business that we were running at home. So, he was just a kind of friend of the family really. But I do distinctly remember going in and opening my first account [laughs]. 

Then later on I remember there was a wonderful model shop, not the same one as we had around the corner from us. When my father and my brothers at some point or other, were very into making model aeroplanes. And I think they used to use this shop for their… their supplies. And I always, if ever I went past it, or whatever, it was always, as far as I was concerned, it was a boy’s shop. There was a good bakers next to the Welsh couple’s shop and that shop remained a bakery for many, many, many, many years until comparatively recently, when it’s been sort of swallowed up into a…an expanded corner store.

South Norwood High Street Stories is funded by Historic England’s High Streets Heritage Action Zone programme delivered by Croydon Council. For more information visit www.croydon.gov.uk/southnorwood

Image Credit: Croydon Archives. Donated by the Croydon Natural History Scientific Society