West Ealing Memories

An Ealing Today member recalls W13 from another era

I write to seek whether there are any older Ealing Today readers who remember a specific area of West Ealing from the late 1940s or early 1950s.

The area is bounded by Felix Road in the north and Uxbridge Road in the South, an area now occupied by a 1970s housing estate. Running north-south is Romsey Road. But in 1950 when I was 7 years old it was Williams Road that ran from the ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ footbridge south to the Uxbridge Road.

I am positive that there was a parade of shops at the junction of Williams and Felix Roads which included an ice cream parlour called Pulumbo’s, a fish and chip shop, a newspaper shop, and rag and bone merchant. Further south along Williams Road was a small estate of then brand new ‘pre-fab’ houses and a factory with a tall, bright new aluminium chimney. I was told the factory made shoes and owned by Bata.

West of Williams Road was a small network of streets in which two factory-based businesses existed – the Autotype Company, and the Troy Laundry. The streets and factory buildings were razed to make way for the 1970s housing estate.

My interest stems from being a boy whose mother shopped in the area every Thursday following collecting my father’s pay at Paddington station where he was a railwayman (we lived in Cavendish Avenue, a shop-free area, obliging my mother to walk me and my younger brother south to the shops in Williams Road).

Thursday meant dashing back from Paddington to West Ealing station, buying fish and chips, going to Pulumbo’s for ice cream and then the paper shop for my mother to get her weekly ‘Woman’ and ‘John Bull’ magazines, and me to pick up my copy of ‘The Eagle’ comic. With that we walked back to Cav Av, over Jacob’s Ladder, across Drayton Green.

It would be personally rewarding to hear from someone who also remembers the area and its shops as it was 60 or so years ago.

Mike Abbott

Can anyone help? Do you have any photos of the area?

Please email the editor and discuss on the forum

24th February 2011