I Feel Like A Line In An Old Song

 I've been out of England a long while now, and I know they say time marches on, and yes it does, and "progress" happens, but last night about broke my heart. 

I had been looking through some pictures of old steam trains, and came across one at Liverpool Street station in the 1960s, and it transported me back to my childhood. I could smell the steam, the oil, the soot, that was a part of the station back in that era. I LOVED Liverpool Street station.

We'd catch the tube from Leytonstone, and then walk through to the Broad Street entrance, when we were going to visit Aunt Maud. She lived about a mile away, opposite the Catholic church and school on Mark Street, in what back then) we kids thought was a lovely Victorian block of flats on an old cobbled road, with bollards at the end, that we loved to leapfrog over.

It was maybe 15 years ago that I'd asked my dad if he could go over and take some pictures for me, and he told me they'd been part of slum clearance in the 1970s - and I'd been aghast at the idea they were a slum but then looking with adult eyes I realised I saw my childhood through rose coloured spectacles, as they say.

Well, last night, I found out that more of my memories had been destroyed. The station that I loved so much was now an office block. Gone was the turreted Victorian brickwork and in it's place, an ugly square block.

It seems I am not the only one who finds the newer building has less character than the old.

#broadstreetstation #memories #childhood revisited