Research rabbit hole ~ Portswood 1935

I lived in Portswood for a couple of years in the early 1980s, in a flat on Belmont Road, so when I wrote A Dish Best Served Cold, and my characters took me there, I already had a feel for the area. Things were different in Portswood in 1935, but modern-day Portswood still has remnants of its past glory, if you look closely. These, along with old photographs and searches through Kelly’s Directories, formed the bones of my story’s world. As usual, my research led me down some interesting rabbit holes and uncovered lots of snippets of information, many of which never made it onto the page. Rather than waste them, I’ll share them with you now.

The name Portswood is fairly self-explanatory. The area was once woodland and later became a manor, granted to St Denys Priory by Richard I in 1189. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536, Francis Dawtry purchased the land and became lord of the manor. Over the years, the manor passed through many hands until, in 1771, Giles Stibbert, a Lieutenant-General with the East India Company and later Commander-in-Chief of India, built the first manor house, Portswood House. In 1852, the house was demolished, and the estate sold off for development. Gradually, the population of Portswood grew from around thirty houses in 1837 to over twenty-two thousand in 1911. In 1914, the University moved to Highfield, and this has shaped Portswood ever since.

In 1935, the busiest part of Portswood centred around the junction of Highfield Lane and St Denys Road, a staggered junction back then, known as Portswood Junction. The tram depot was one of the major landmarks with Portswood Police Station to its north and a small parade of shops between it and St Denys Road. They included A E Turner, the grocer, Fred Pearce, the butcher, J E Maffey, the baker and William Spurr, the tobacconist. Spurr’s tobacconist shop plays a small part in A Dish Best Served Cold. Between it and the tram depot was the Belmont Hotel, still a pub today but now renamed The Mitre. 

The tram depot opened in 1879. At first, the trams were horse drawn, but in 1898, Southampton Corporation purchased The Southampton Tramway Company for £51,000, and everything changed. Southampton Corporation had owned the Southampton Electric Light and Power Company for two years, and they now began electrifying the trams. The first electric route opened in 1900. They built many of the tramcars in the Portswood depot, including specially designed round topped trams that could go through the Bargate Arch. The 1930s were the golden years of Southampton trams with routes all over the town, which the characters in A Dish Best Served Cold used regularly. Gladys and Clara caught trams to and from work, and during their leisure time, when they took advantage of the other landmarks of Portswood, the cinemas.

Portswood had two cinemas, The Palladium, next to the library and opposite the tram depot, and the Broadway, a little further along Portswood Road, near the junction of Brookvale Road. This meant that Portswood residents didn’t have to go into town to watch a film, and the families who lived in the new ‘Flower estate’ in Swaythling had entertainment near at hand. In A Dish Best Served Cold, Gladys and Clara spent a lot of their free time in the cinemas, as did most young girls in 1935.

Portswood’s first cinema was the Palladium, on Portswood Broadway, designed by architect Ingleton Sanders of the firm Jurd and Sanders. Mayor Henry Bower opened it on 17 February 1913. An attractive building with an arched pediment, bay windows, and a glass canopy covering the pavement for the length of the building, it was said to be the ‘prettiest picture house south of London.’ Mrs Winifred M Hood Confectioner ran a sweet shop at the front of the cinema between the main door and the library, so cinema patrons could buy snacks to enjoy while they watched the films. The auditorium was decorated in pale blue, Wedgewood style, and the seats were plush royal blue velvet. In its early days, it hosted a group of wounded Great War troops and Belgian refugees to watch a screening of Tipperary.

Because of its location, opposite the tram depot, it was a popular cinema. With a seating capacity of 650 (500 in the stalls and 150 in the balcony), it kept the Portswood residents amused at a time when cinemas, pubs and dance halls were the main form of entertainment for the masses. By the middle of the twentieth century, John Logie Baird’s famous invention, television, had become affordable to the masses. People stayed at home more and cinemas struggled to survive. After forty-five years, the curtains of the Palladium closed for the last time on 3 May 1958, at the end of a showing of Murder at St Trinian’s, starring Margaret Rutherford. The glass canopy was removed, and the building became a Fine Fare supermarket.

Portswood Road is the main route through Portswood. This long, winding road begins at the junction of Langhorn Road and Woodmill Lane, but is actually a continuation of Swaythling High Road. The road meanders through Portswood to the junction of Lodge Road and Lawn Road — where the original Portswood House once stood — when it becomes Bevois Hill, Bevois Valley Road and Onslow Road. It may have many names along its length, but this one long road connects Swaythling with the centre of Southampton. The section of Portswood Road from St Denys Road to Brookvale Road is known as Portswood Broadway and is Portswood’s equivalent of a High Street. In 1935, it was a bustling place, full of shops, people, cars, bicycles and trams.

With so much through traffic, the shops and pubs of Portswood did a roaring trade, so it was no surprise when they built a second cinema in 1930. Situated at the southern end of the Broadway, it meant that the main shopping street began and ended with a cinema. The Broadway Cinema was a large and impressive building, seating over 1,500 people. With a crenellated turret at each corner, it had the look of a castle. Inside, it was decorated with wood panels, painted plaster, and paintings of medieval knights and castles. It even had a small restaurant upstairs and VIP boxes for the well-heeled. The first film shown was Rookery Nook starring Tom Wells. In 1936 it became part of Associated British Cinemas, with sixpenny Saturday morning shows for children.

Like most of Portswood, the Broadway escaped the worst ravages of the Southampton Blitz. It survived the curse of television a little longer than The Palladium, but in October 1963, after showings of West 11 with Diana Dors and Unearthly Stranger starring John Neville, it closed. It then spent almost fifty years as a bingo hall before becoming a church in around 2010. The main facade remains unchanged from its cinema days.

Another Portswood landmark featured in the book was harder to research. I gave Gladys and Clara jobs in a laundry because the story was inspired by and dedicated to my mother. I knew from the 1939 census that she had been a laundry maid before she married my father. Mum lived in Carnation Road, Swaythling, so there were three laundries she might have worked at, Alfred Pope’s Laundry, on Salisbury Road, Highfield, Woodmill Laundry at 536 and 538 Portswood Road, or Amey’s Laundry at 310 and 312 Portswood Road. The closest to her was Woodmill Laundry, near Woodmill Lane and the High Road end of Portswood Road. Despite this, my gut drew me to Amey’s. It was further from Swaythling but nearer to the centre of Portswood. For the purposes of my story, it made more sense.

Information and pictures of the laundry were thin on the ground, but I discovered a photograph of a staff outing on a local history Facebook group. Lo-and-behold, on the left of the picture, half hidden by a woman in a spotty dress in the front row, was a woman who looked very much like my mum. Whether it was her or it was wishful thinking, I couldn’t say, but I felt vindicated in choosing Amey’s out of the three laundries.

Amey’s was on the west side of Portswood Road, halfway between Osbourne Road and Kent Road, where my maternal great grandparents lived – another reason for thinking Mum worked there. William Amey opened his laundry in 1890 and lived next door in a house called Canford. It was a large laundry with big contracts, including local hospitals, shipping lines and wealthy yachtsmen. The sixty foot high chimney and the steady stream of vans taking an unending supply of laundry baskets in and out made it a well known Portswood business. This tall chimney leads me to believe it was a steam laundry, although I could be wrong. Amey’s closed in 1974, and the tower and laundry buildings were demolished in 1985. Mr Amey’s house still stands, but the site of the laundry is now a spur of Portswood Road leading onto Thomas Lewis Way.

While buildings like Amey’s Laundry and the tram depot have gone, much of the fabric of Portswood remains unchanged. The tram lines and the shop awnings are no longer there, but above the modern shop fronts, the old buildings that would have been familiar to my mum remain. Some of those buildings will feature in future books, but I’ll save those Portswood rabbit holes for another day.

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