Not West Bridgford No. 1

One of the most characteristic features of English suburbs, wherever they are, is the shopping parade. Often dating from between the wars, of from the immediate postwar era, many were built with service roads alongside main thoroughfares. Various regional and historical styles were adopted, with watered down Georgian being popular, as was black and white half-timbered, usually described as Tudorbethan or even Tudor. The “Tudor” cinema was a classic example, in the heart of West Bridgford, and with a surprisingly short lifespan, just thirty years, from 1931 to 1961. I was lucky enough to visit it maybe half a dozen times, on one occasion on a school trip to see “The Inn  of the Sixth Happiness”. Along with most other suburban cinemas in Nottingham the “Tudor” became a victim of the success of television.

The fate of the “Tudor” cinema, with its steeply gabled A-frame frontage and its “goth-Tudor” neon sign (it would have been so at home in Los Angeles, and so would I), was to disappear in a pile of rubble, shortly to be reconstructed as a Fine Fare supermarket and adjacent inspirational gems of 1960s “architecture”. Its name survives in Tudor Square, the anything but square road junction (then unnamed)  where it stood, so irregular in shape that to this day it has withstood the installation of traffic lights, which it badly needs, and in Tudor Road, a nearby new thoroughfare of bland housing. The Tudor style, however, is replicated in odd places in West Bridgford and, it must be admitted, elsewhere in the Nottingham area, and in suburbs just about anywhere. It appears, for instance, in the design of shops, houses, and garages both private and commercial.

Elements of the style can be found less than a mile from Tudor Square, in a short parade of shops in Loughborough Road - an area sometimes referred to as The Wolds – and opposite a now much-mangled 1930s pub that used to be called “The Wolds”, a watering hole favoured by those returning from a good send-off at Wilford Hill.cremmie, further up the road. And presumably not by those not returning …

The accompanying photo is a lot like the Loughborough Road parade of shops (I’m not including the originals for comparison in any of this series), but it isn’t. It’s my first example of Not West Bridgford. The location is in fact in Eden Park, in south-east London, roughly half way between Bromley and Croydon. The 020 phone number is a dead giveaway but, well, you have to use your imagination a bit.