1948 to about 1958: Railways.
My local venue was Oxford. Walton Well Road, leading to Port Meadow, and on the north side of Oxford engine shed, where all steam activity went on. Click here for a related image. And Oxford station of course. Another favourite location was Surbiton station, a pleasant walk from my grandmother Penfold’s home at 90 Surbiton Road, Kingston. I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but I was witnessing the demise of steam, which had changed England irrevocably since it appeared on rails in 1825. Its glory days were over. In 1948 I was just in time to see and feel that I was part of (what I later discovered was the Atlee government’s) ‘Indian Summer’ of railway steam locos, post-World War II, under the chief engineer Riddles, whose ‘Brittania” class in the form of 70014 Morning Star on the 4.30 Milk Train epitomised for a young Oxford lad 'the glories of steam and technology and the way ahead.’
When I was ‘trainspotting’ (as I did not really call it at the time) at Walton Well Road in the 1940s and 1950s, I was unaware of the significance of Walton Street, from which it led, as an important location in the historical life of the Archer family in Oxford. The family homes at 7 Tackley Place and 64 Kingston Road, were very much in that area, and the Walton Street Methodist chapel where my grandfather William was married and his father Alfred George Archer was (according to his obituaries anyway) a distinguished local preacher, was somewhere (as yet not precisely located) along the street until it closed in 1946.