Rose Hill Area

Memories from the 30s

By Bill Mallion

Rose Hill was the epicentre of my growing-up world.  Born in the summer of 1932 at the bypass end of Garendon Road, I was, in my early years,  prammed, push-chaired, walked by Mum, and “flying-angelled” by Dad,  up that short stretch of Reigate Avenue with its terraced and semi-detached houses lying back behind grass banks and greens on one side, whilst opposite was the grass bank and orchard of Rose Hill House.  As we neared the shops (and where the pedestrian bridge now stands) we passed the blue, “Tardis” Police Box, next to the white concrete and red-framed GPO telephone kiosk.  Just before you turned the corner by the roundabout, there was the freshly-painted “Reigate Avenue” sign and underneath it, rather rusty and neglected. One for “A217 Tooting-Hookwood Road”.  I wonder how many local people today would know where Hookwood is?  Clue: Follow the Brighton Road South, past Reigate, until you reach Povey Cross, just before Gatwick airport!  That obsolete sign stayed up throughout the war, perhaps to confuse the German Panzer convoys as they made their way towards London!

 Earliest memories (some vague, some remarkably clear) include the huge canopy of a garage (LEX I think) as you crossed towards the shops. This disappeared and the service road in front of the shops leading up to Rose Hill Avenue appeared in its place.  A filling station of the same name arose down the bypass, past the Southern Railway  bridge, opposite the sports field belonging to Wandgas Athletic Club.  Meanwhile, from my pushchair, I watched as lofty elm trees were felled, to make way for the Gaumont cinema. 

Modernistic shops and flats materialised, their bowed-front facing the roundabout reminiscent of an ocean liner, and sometimes referred to as “The Queen Mary”. 

Meanwhile, the corner at the start of Green Lane had clay pits like shell holes that rapidly filled with water after rain. These disappeared in 1940, when large brick, public air-raid shelters were built. by which time we had moved into 24 Reigate Avenue, and become “semi-detached”!” After the war the shelters themselves disappeared under the Cheshire House flats.  Facing the roundabout, on the corner of Wrythe Lane, was “The Rose” pub, with its (for those days) extensive car park planned, I suppose, to cater for the traffic heading for Brighton- mostly coaches (or charabancs as some of our parents quaintly called them).  The outbreak of war in September 1939 was to put pay to that idea, but the big, double-decker 88 buses would terminate there and rest before they plied their way back to distant Acton Green. 

I remember being fascinated by the shop assistants, all outside their shops, in the varied uniforms of Boots, Sainsburys, Tescos, McFarlands, Hearns, Ralphs, and all the other shops at that time. To a child, the shops were a wonderland in the evening, lit-up as they were by a string of gas streetlights and with their own gaily-lit windows.  All of this too, disappeared into darkness at the introduction of the “Blackout” which lasted throughout my school days, until 1945.