Author: Jen Dixon

Some more from the “Memories of Stirchley” gathered from local people in the 1980s. These are memories of Stirchley School and childhood during the Second World War, taken from Ron Allcock, Pat Collins, and Ivor Gornall. All three attended Stirchley School from 1940, and left between 1945 and 1948. The photograph shows the school over twenty years previously (we couldn’t find many pictures of Stirchley during WW2).

Early in the War when the children were evacuated, school was held in private houses but the children soon returned to Stirchley. …

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The Ten Acres and Stirchley Street Co-operative Society (later TASCO), as it states in the picture above, was established on 1875. It was begun in the front room of a house on Hazelwell Lane, the house in the photograph below, by the group of men also pictured. The humble little shop opened its doors on 5 June that year.

The history of co-op’s goes back to 1844, when the first was set up in Rochdale, Lancashire. The food sold to working people was often either expensive, or of poor quality and mixed with other, less edible, ingredients. Co-op’s charged …

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The library is home to several oral histories which were recorded in the 1980s, and are still kept on cassette tape. Thankfully, the histories were transcribed, because tape players are a rare thing to find now!

One local history was given by George Phillips about the Umberslade Road area of Stirchley:

“I’m 76 years old and I’m George Phillips. I’ve lived in Umberslade Road all my life. We live about half way down in a block of ten houses. At first there were just these …

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Hazelwell Lane was cleared several years ago for new developments, one of which was the new Aldi store. Just before the last of the houses were demolished, in 2012, the illustration above was commissioned to capture the street before it was cleared completely. It used old photographs and the surviving houses to depict what it probably looked like in about the 1950s.

So, you can take a little walk down Hazelwell Lane as it used to look.

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Stirchley Carnival was held annually in the 1920s and 1930s, with the last carnival in 1939, and then a few carnivals were held in the 1980s.

In the 1980s oral histories were taken from local residents, including Mr. and Mrs. Fisher who recalled the carnival. It was also at the 1937 carnival fair that the couple first met.

“The carnival procession would start from Cotteridge Park and go down Franklin Road and Mary Vale Road to the Pershore Road. The Procession would be a band, some floats …

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