Laindon, Essex

Margaret Pearman

As Sheila mentions, the above photo shows my grandfather Arthur Pearman collecting my grandmother Margaret Pearman (whom I never met unfortunately). He didn't even realise someone had taken this photo.

Laindon High Road

This photograph shows a car with a lady coming out of a shop.This car belonged to my neighbour Arthur Pearman who now lives in Billericay. The lady was his wife who is now no longer with us. Arthur had bought this car as a wreck and rebuilt it.Obviously he was and still is proud of it because few people had cars in those days it was indeed a luxury.He is also sad about the High Road no longer being there,it was over a mile long with shops all along both sides. It was compulsory purchased by the then Basildon Corporation so he says.Evidently his family owned much of the land in Laindon.On the other side of the road there is a white van from which goods are being sold. this man is the same man who kept lions along the Crays Hill Road for many years and became very famous because of that.

my fathers workplace

This memory of the Fortune of War, was a photograph that my mother has. This is of my father Reginald Waddingham who was a barman at the hotel. They all wore white jackets. The photo showed all of the employees and the boss standing outside. It was amazing that a lot of people worked there. I can remember catching a no 14 Eastern National bus outside the Fortune of War to Southend and watching all the coaches coming into the public house on their way to Southend on Sea for the day. It is now a shame that the Fortune of War is no longer there, only houses, but what a lot of memories that the hotel holds.

Basildon Living Memories Pocket Album

Laindon School—formerly Laindon High Road School—opened in 1928. It eventually merged with Nicholas School to become the new James Hornby High School (named after the final teacher at the St Nicholas’s church annexe). The Laindon site was finally closed in 2000, when it was decided that the Nicholas buildings were more suitable.

Basildon - A History & Celebration

Basildon is one of eight New Towns which were set up around London between 1946 and 1949, immediately after the Second World War. However, the drift from the overcrowded cities (especially London) and into the countryside is not a new idea; it has been a phenomenon of the entire 20th century. Sir. Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) was the principal founder of the English garden city movement. His plans outlined the creation of new towns of limited size, planned in advance and surrounded by a belt of agricultural land. As he declared in 1904: ‘I venture to suggest that while the age in which we live is the age of the great closely-compacted, overcrowded city, there are already signs, for those who can read them, of a coming change so great and so momentous that the twentieth century will A Momentous Meeting at Laindon School On a bleak night in October 1948, the Rt Hon Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning, came to address a packed meeting at Laindon High Road School, and the plans to turn Basildon into a New Town were set in motion. The residents flocked to hear what he had to say, and many stood outside the school listening to his speech over the tannoy system. ‘Basildon will become a city which people from all over the world will want to visit’, said the Minister, ‘a place where all classes of the community can meet together’. Lewis Silkin tried to reassure the residents that the intention was to build, not destroy: ‘In between the two towns of Pitsea and Laindon is a large area, and I propose to use it to form the nucleus of Basildon New Town’. The old village of Basildon was chosen as the town’s centre. Of course, not everyone agreed with him, and there was plenty of opposition to the plan from many local people who feared the threat of compulsory purchase of their homes and the disruption this would cause.

Basildon Living Memories Pocket Album

D & E Flack’s (left) was a general store and post office serving the area north of the Southend road. By the end of the 1950s, outlying shops were competing with the new Town Centre development. Reckitts Blue—advertised on the fence—was a well-known bleaching agent of the time.