Four Pounds Avenue

From my own collection. 1st dated 1956, 2nd dated 1957.

It looks like the construction of the bridge over the Sherbourne, where in 1961, after torrential rain, I slipped in and nearly drowned. In those days there was no park, just allotments and waste ground.

Wasn't 'Lake View Park' as it's known (what lake?) the site for deposits of rubble from the Blitz?

My grandparents lived in Malvern Road. A lake was planned for Lake View Road but never materialised, Neil. I also remember the Black Pad and allotments, prior to Four Pounds Avenue proper, as a quick route to the Plaza cinema at Spon Arches!

From the late 50s onwards (maybe before that even), the allotments were near the corner of Four Pounds and Lake View Rd, and only occupied a tiny fraction of the whole area, which extended as far as Prince of Wales Rd in one direction, and Grayswood Ave in another. As little kids, we thought it went for miles, and had great fun exploring. A large amount of the pre-park area was taken up with huge mounds of waste soil and clay that had been dumped. The soil certainly contained bits of rubble, and other stuff from houses, e.g. old lavatory cisterns, door frames, rusting sheets of corrugated iron... we had great fun building dens, digging holes and so on. An old wooden fence ran alongside the road opposite the houses. Rather than walk up the road to the pedestrian gate, we used to climb over. The fence was so rotten that one day it collapsed into the road, landing on top of one of my friends as he was climbing. He wasn't badly hurt, more shaken. There was no elf n' safety in those days.

My parents, who moved there after the war, told me that once in a blue moon, when the Sherbourne burst its bank, the lower lying area became a lake. But there was never an official man-made lake there during my childhood.

Lake View Park has its own (small) thread

There was just a trickle running behind the allotments when we lived in Chapelfields. Did Prof mention the Plaza, we only knew it as the Flea Pit in the early 60's and then the eerie Chain Gardens. Also memories of the Alvis Sports Club just a few years earlier.