Back Then

Street names are often changed over the years and often there is a rational reason. But sometimes it is difficult to find. In Wapping there are two prewar blocks of flats on Greenbank. Willoughby house and Vancouver house and there was a road running between them from Greenbank to Wapping high Street named Red lion street.  This road is now called Reardons Path. Of course it is not a path it is still a vehicular road. And even more strangely there was already a Reardons Path,still there, which is actually a path. It runs from Greenbank to Watt Street. All very strange. Just as odd as the local council replacing tarmac covered roads with ancient cobbles.  This all in the name of progress or am I being cynical in thinking it is more to do with a sop to property developers. The cobbles of course did not bring the old dockside atmosphere back: a bit difficult with land rovers and porsches being parked on them. In Red Lion street there was old  warehousing  being develope...

Primary school children have always brought home notes from school with messages about upcoming events or rules which could not be trusted to those fallible young memories.  These days they are printed out in the school office on laser or inkjet printers, after having been typed up on a computer. It wasn't always so. Before these very handy and efficient printers there were duplicators, Roneo or Gestetner, bulky and often messy machines which used paper stencils which had been typed on a manual typewriter with the ribbon removed so that the keys would cut through the stencil. Before that there were the various types of gel copier. This is difficult to describe to anyone who has not seen them.  Essentially messages were written on to coated paper with special inks.  The paper was then pressed into a pad of gelatin like material to which the ink transferred.  A sheet of paper was then pressed very carefully into the gel thus producing a copy.  One copy at a...