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More Anniversary Reflections
As a founder-member of the Society, though
not these days an active member, I would like to congratulate
everyone concerned with the special Silver Anniversary edition
of Focus. All the articles were fascinating and very readable,
but I found two of particular interest.
My memories of Croydon don't go back as far
as Hugh Byford's in "The Painful Path to Pedestrianisation"
but, as a pupil at Trinity School before it moved to Shirley,
I do recall walking out of the school's front gate (shown in
the photo and later to become the Whitgift Centre's main entrance)
into the maelstrom of buses, trams (at first), cars, vans and
shoppers that was the North End of the 1950s. And I'm sure late
occasionally with my mother in the Merry Kettle restaurant (set
lunch of meat, two veg and pudding for three shillings or 15p),
although Hugh reckons it didn't survive the war. Alternative
lunch venues were Kennards' Blue Room - "blue" referring
to nothing more sinister than the neon lighting - and Wilsons,
from where the aroma of roasting coffee beans used to waft around
North End and George Street.
On a rather more serious note, with hindsight
I agree with Hugh that pedestrianisation was the right decision
for North End ten years or so ago. However, I have always thought
it regrettable that nothing was done (by way of more bus lanes
and superior shelter facilities, for example) to compensate for
the fact that many people found themselves with longer walks
to and from their buses, some had to wait at more exposed stops,
and others had to put up with roundabout bus routings through
the town. The millennium celebrations have come and gone but
still, after emerging from the dingy back door of the Whitgift
Centre (no signpost to help visitors), we have to trudge all
round the perimeter of the church grounds, with no protection
from the weather, to reach the bus station.
Which brings me to Richard Pywell's "Tale
of Two Interchanges." As older Croydonians may remember,
it used to be possible, after leaving your train at West Croydon
and walking up the ramp, to turn left and come straight out into
Station Road near the bus terminus. Richard's account of how,
because of a catalogue of delays, bureaucratic excuses and lack
of co-ordination between the various authorities, the side exit
from the station remains blocked off to this day, is indeed best
summed up by his own word - staggering. Integrated transport
policy, anyone?
We can be sure of one thing. If such relatively small and inexpensive
measures as those which would help public transport users in
the West Croydon area had instead been ones designed to benefit
motorists, the work would have been done years ago.
Harry Goodchild.
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