Westbourne Then & Now

The village of Westbourne has changed so fast in the last few years that in some places it is quite difficult to recognise what it was like ninety or a hundred years ago.

Photographs of the village in the early years of this century are becoming increasingly hard to find, partly because they are simply fading away and partly because each generation finds it difficult to keep all that is passed down.

The idea of this small book is both to make a record of some of these pictures and to show how individual parts of the village have, or have not, changed.

Moreover, without a record showing the evolution of some of the roads and buildings in the last 90 years it could in another hundred years be almost impossible to see how the village of that day had developed.

Because the speed of change was slower in the past there are still many in the village who remember the scenes in the pictures even though the photographs were taken before their time and who recall from their childhood the well known village figures of the past.

In a short introduction like this it is only possible to pick out a few points on which to elaborate.

Sadly, there are now fewer shops and only one of them a grocer’s but within these pages there are pictures of five such shops. Tree’s (in The Square), Trudgett’s (in North Street), Weston’s (at the beginning of East Street), Millington’s (further up East Street) and Johnson’s (up North Street).

Before 1913 the boys’ and the girls’ school were separate; the boys in School Lane (page 27) and the girls in Church Road. In 1913 the ‘new’ school in River Street was opened but as the picture on page 26 shows there was a high fence to divide the boys from the girls.

Published 1990 ISBN 0 9507496 3 X

WESTBOURNE THEN AND NOW