Not West Bridgford No. 3

Like all affluent suburbs, West Bridgford is well provided with retail facilities, and among its shopping parades are those in Melton, Loughborough and Abbey Roads, Compton Acres, Hilton Crescent and Trent Boulevard. The principal shopping thoroughfare is Central Avenue, which leads off Tudor Square, with businesses now creeping into the ends of Rectory, Albert, Bridgford, Davies and above all Gordon Road.

Traditionally, Central Avenue boasted all the usual run of shops for food and household items, including a Co-op, and the Tudor Cinema. Since the turn of the millennium the emphasis has changed, not as in so many places downwards in the direction of pound shops and charity shops, but towards refreshment. In this small area there are well over a dozen coffee shops, bars and restaurants catering for the well-heeled population, plus a handful of travel agents, opticians, florists, building societies, pharmacies, and other businesses. As an evening venue, Central Avenue offers an attractive and relatively quiet alternative to the centre of Nottingham.

 
Unusually, compared with most shopping streets, Central Avenue is not completely hemmed in by shops, and for part of its eastern side is bordered by what has long been known as the “croquet lawn”, in effect an extension of Bridgford Park. Once lined by giant poplars, in Springtime magnificent blossoms are now to be found here, and the area continues to rebuff the encroachment of car parking and other philistine developments, which would destroy much of the attractiveness that brings people here in the first place. Another location that features such an arrangement of adjacent greenery is the east London suburb of Wanstead, and the accompanying  illustration shows Wanstead High Street, E.11. Wanstead has an ambience, a pleasant “feel”, very similar to that of West Bridgford, although it enjoys the additional attraction of having its own tube station..

Not West Bridgford No. 2

A variant on “Not West Bridgford No. 1”, here we have another shopping parade with strong resemblances to those in West Bridgford, in particular Central Avenue and Loughborough Road. This one happens to be in affluent Pinner, in the heart of Metroland in north-west London, and famous as the birthplace of Sir Elton John. 

Shopping is a crucially important activity for suburbanites wherever they live, as this series of illustrations reflects. Just across from the Loughborough Road shops, in 1960, West Bridgford became the site of what was described as Great Britain’s first hypermarket, an American innovation that would drive the shopping experience into the twentieth century. This was The Future.

 
The GEM, with its big red neon logo was, by today’s standards, a pretty average supermarket, although I recall that it sold furniture, including beds, as well as food and general household items. In due course it became Asda, then a homely British label, and a store that was always well stocked and pleasant to use. For many years the store front faced south, onto the car park, but subsequently, with the new designation as Asda-Walmart, everything became bigger, the layout rotated through 90 degrees to face the east, and traditional shoppers perhaps soon discovered that American ownership of “the future of retail” left something to be desired. Shopping will also be the theme in the third “Not West Bridgford”, to be posted in the near future.

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.

Introduction to 'Not West Bridgford'

Like jokes, paintings are probably best left unexplained. And like many other creative endeavours, it’s often the case with paintings – at least in my experience – that the ones destined to succeed are completed relatively swiftly and painlessly. The troublesome ones requiring endless alteration and fiddling around with are usually, though by no means invariably, those that are never going to be any good.

One of my favourite recent paintings, currently on show at Bingham library, Notts., that (a) needs little explanation, (b) proceeded easily to completion, and (c) appears to have succeeded, is “Road near the park”.

 

“Road near the park” (greyscale version), © R. Abbott  2015

 

The road in question is Edward Road, near its junction with Crosby Road, and the park is Bridgford Park, in West Bridgford, Nottingham. Visiting the location last autumn I was immediately entranced by the scene, by the angles of the roads, the sunlight on the brickwork, and the tall telegraph pole with its characteristic little curly spike on the top, one of my earliest fetishes of street furniture. Instantly I knew that I had walked into a successful picture, so I took a photograph for reference, and the painting followed speedily and with little effort.

The location is within half a mile of my childhood stamping ground. The road in which I grew up was once described by the local evening paper as being typically suburban, though now I cannot recall whether this judgement was deemed favourable or not. From my perspective I am happy to be associated with such a background, and while aware of the popular sneers against suburbia, I see little that is fundamentally wrong with this component of the urban environment; after all, statistically, suburbs are where most of us live.

Many years of travelling around, in the UK and elsewhere, have widened my knowledge of suburbs, of how and why they came to be, what they look like, how they feel. More than a few, I’ve discovered, remind me of West Bridgford. Several  years ago I had the whimsical idea that it would be fun to put together a small exhibition of images that would be called ‘Not West Bridgford’, photographs of places that looked like West Bridgford, but weren’t. Ideally, I imagined that the exhibition would be a physical collection of photographs and explicatory text, perhaps held in the local public library. Perhaps one day it will be, but for the time being I am proposing something more modest.

 
Instead, therefore, I am planning to post images from this ‘Not West Bridgford’ collection online, at intervals over the next few months. The intention, apart from some mild amusement to those who recognise what the images are not, is to explore some themes of suburban life in this delightful Nottingham district and to consider how they relate to other specimens of suburbia.

Halfway through the show

My small exhibition of paintings at Bingham public library, Nottinghamshire, is roughly half way through, and the display will be taken down on Saturday, 28th February. Apparently there has been a steady stream of viewers, and some appreciative comments made, but so far no sales – nobody has any money at this time of year!

A couple of weeks ago a gentleman came into the library saying he had heard there was a painting of “The Test Match”. Indeed, there is. This is a greyscale version of it:

© R. Abbott 2015

It’s an art deco pub in Gordon Road, West Bridgford, the principal southern suburb of Nottingham, and it is to be recommended, not least for its ambience. My painting is a somewhat idealised, early morning representation of what, on the average weekday, is a busy and somewhat cluttered corner. Sadly, it seems, the enquirer was hoping for a painting of a cricket match, such as takes place at Trent Bridge, half a mile or so from the pub - which is of course named after the most famous event of the cricket season. I hope he didn’t go away too disappointed. Never mind. I shall be saying more about West Bridgford in subsequent posts, and connecting it further with my interests in art and in the suburban environment.

Meanwhile, go along to Bingham library and view the exhibition while it lasts. Details of location and opening hours are given on my previous post.