Walking Past – A selection of stories gathered during the project

• Boys in trouble with police after being caught throwing tomatoes at each other on the allotments
• A woman given an allotment that had road foundations just below the surface
• Boys catching pigeons (to be trained as racers) under the railway bridge
• Children pinching bananas from a warehouse near the Buttermarket
• Free canal boat trip for local children on Easter Mondays
• Man falling in the canal and hauling himself out covered in green slime
• Cows escaping up Britannia Place (by the pub) from Castle Foregate when being taken to market on Smithfield
• Cockroaches revealed by electric light on kitchen floor first thing in morning. (Before the arrival of electricity in Castlefields (late 20s/early30s) they had time to scatter while a person was fiddling with matches to light a candle or a lamp)
• Outside toilets and newspaper toilet paper (some houses still had these in 1960s)
• Very short sweet shop/grocer lady needs stepladders to get most things off shelves
• Playing balloon basketball in long hallway in North Street
• Drunk man singing songs loudly and badly on way home from pub on Fridays and Saturdays around 11.00 pm
• Castlefields Carnival Queen
• Local girls dancing with bussed-in airmen with badly burned faces at 2.00 am in Lewis’s Ballroom on New Park Road
• Discovering hundreds of bottles in ground where bungalows built around Avondale and Tarvin Drive – site of earlier pigsties and allotments – probably used for insulating the pigsties
• Young people dancing to an old record player in the 123 Club in a shack near the allotments
• Pub outings from the Telegraph in a coach
• Swimming by the weir on hot sunny days and walking across it despite lots of dire warnings
• The Rat Hotel – when the Maltings became a barracks during the war
• A fourteen year old telegraph boy repeatedly being the bearer of bad news about war casualties
• Making a circle of giant puffballs on a raised flowerbed on New Park Road and watching them being kicked to pieces
• Johnny two slaps is innocent!
• The Beatles going to a party on Gough’s Island after performing at the Music Hall in 1962
• Boys scrumping walnuts and damsons and being chased off Gough’s Island by a very large wolfhound
• The Castlefields football team – great rivalry with Frankwell
• The Castlefields All Stars (?)Jazz Band – again rivalry with Frankwell
• Closing gates at night at Prison end of Beacalls Lane – to remind people it was not a public highway
• Going on holiday – lugging heavy suitcases to the station – taxis too expensive
• Ditherington so named because condemned people dithered on their way to the gallows at Heathgates – probably a myth!
• Causeway (the Causey) constructed through Spring Gardens because of boggy ground and roads quickly becoming impassable in wet weather. The Comet/Coach pub is below the road surface
• Evacuee children from Liverpool received schooling in the All Saints Hall
• Before Castlefields was built up, much of the area along Victoria Street was taken up by allotments or ‘detached gardens’ for town’s people living within the ‘loop’. They were used for horticulture and pleasure – many had summer houses
• Donkey Alley – why?
• Traders/craftsmen of all sorts in Castlefields made it, in many ways, self-sufficient – cobblers, hairdressers, decorators, plumbers, saddle makers, butchers, bakers, etc
• Last public hanging at Shrewsbury prison in 1868
• Prisoners shouting messages out of cell windows to friends at the Buttermarket
• Lancasterian School approach – monitors and forms
• Dog and Pheasant Pie Competition
• In 1914, Mayor Wingfield opens Shrewsbury’s first Council House Estate – Wingfield Gardens – designed in a ‘garden village’ style around a green
• Kissing couples in the dark passage beside the Comet in Ditherington
• Milk from a churn in a donkey-drawn cart ladled into your own jug
• GWR Railwaymen’s cottages in John Street
• The communal water pumps at street corners had small gas jets that could be lit in freezing weather – operated by street lamplighters
• People leaving their front and back doors open in thunder and lightning storms so that the lightning would pass through. Also taking down all mirrors in the house
• Celebrating in street parties on VE Day and at coronations (1901, 1910, 1936, 1945, 1953)
• Sad news that a man expected back from Burma after being a prisoner in the war had been beheaded two years earlier
• Air raid shelters on the Pleasure – rather damp underfoot
• Anti-aircraft guns mounted on a platform on the lifting tower of the Maltings – one plane was shot down. Only five bombs were dropped on Shrewsbury (?)causing one fatality
• Siren-testing on a weekly basis at the fire station (where Woodhall Close is now)
• Discouraging people crossing the railway embankment by building steps connecting Wingfield Close to the track leading from the Maltings under the railway to Greenfields
• Homeless people being housed at Derfald House. (Derfald comes from Deer fold or field – there were lots of deer in the ‘New Park’ area)
• One year the salmon leaps either side of the Weir were blocked and the salmon were desperately and unsuccessfully trying to jump up and over the weir. Many people gathered to watch.
• Holts had a mineral water/soft drink bottling plant in the Buttermarket or at the top of Severn Street. Kids would pinch bottles to get the money back on them
• On the top storey of the Buttermarket there were function rooms and offices
• You could buy house coal from a store/shed to one side of the Canal Tavern – you could pay a boy a halfpenny to carry it to your house in a cart that was probably heavier than the coal!
• The canal with only three bridges (Gasworks Lane, Factory Bridge and Comet Bridge) provided a real separation of communities living in Castlefields, St. Michael’s and Ditherington
• Gress Lewis had a bakery and a ‘ballroom’ at the end of New Park Road near where it links to Sultan Road
• Children could go to Sunday School slideshow talks often about the Holy Land in the John Street Gospel Hall – there were free biscuits!
• Many of the houses on either side of New Park Road and also around Water Street were demolished in the 1970s. The Borough Council Conservation Officer stepped in to prevent further demolition much to the annoyance of developers
• Kids playing football in the Castlefields precinct were a real aggravation to pedestrians. In the end, the flowerbeds were redesigned and one exit blocked to try to eliminate the nuisance. This was mostly successful
• The Pleasure Day started in the early 2000s and used to feature a tug of war and races. Local bands often play, though one year, Elvis performed at the event
• There was a communal laundry bath at the top end of Argyll Street – the remains can still be seen
• Memories from the Maltings include: winding up summer holiday students working there; a massively high and very bendy ladder reaching up to the top floor for cleaning gutters; balancing along the plank walkways on the roof; sweating a lot and drinking beer; a fire in the Apprentice House (very high ceilings – the walls were only ever papered to about two thirds of the way up) Pete, is sweating a lot and drinking beer one to go on its own or does it go with the bit about the fire?
• Retrieving keys dropped in the river with a powerful magnet
• People feeding horses from Sydney Avenue with whole loaves of sliced white bread
• Candle boats from Castle Bridge to the Weir on New Year’s Eve
• Massive queue outside the Fortune Teller’s tent at one Pleasure Day