Alton

Forty years before picture No 79440 was taken in 1927, The Swan Hotel looked like this. To the left of The Swan were the hotel stables, and further up the street are several carts and an assortment of pedestrians. The road surface improved and traffic increased in the intervening years.
An extract from from"Hampshire Revisited Photographic Memories".

Alton's long High Street includes various 18th-century buildings as well as some from an earlier period. On the extreme right of the picture stands Freeman, Hardy & Willis, and next to it is a shop selling Jaeger clothing. Beyond these shops stands The Swan Hotel, and next to it is a garage advertising motors for hire.
An extract from from"Hampshire Revisited Photographic Memories".

The first building on the left is vacant, but it later became R E Goodfellow, a butcher’s. This now allows access to the car park behind the manor house, some doors along. The post office is four doors down on the left. It still has a date stone of 1901 beneath the roof. The first car on the right is a 1956 Ford E83W Utility.
An extract from from"Hampshire Living Memories".

The second shop down on the left at 55 High Street is Stoodley & Sons, the jewellers, established in 1861 and still trading in Alton today. Eight buildings down on the right is the Bakers Arms, and on its left is Kerridge’s garage, demolished in 1963. The river still flows in a tunnel under the road and the buildings.
An extract from from"Hampshire Living Memories".

The cenotaph in the High Street commemorates those who died in battle but whose remains lie elsewhere. It is of unusual and classic appearance; it was designed by the architect Harry Inigo Triggs, who had travelled and studied in Italy. The detailing is borrowed from the eight blank panels in the Medici chapel in Florence; on these panels are carved the names of the town’s dead of the First World War. (Plaques were added after the Second World War commemorating the 54 young men who died on duty away from home during that conflict). After much deliberation over an appropriate location for the town’s memorial, it was erected by the mason Andrew Perryman of Dragon Street in its present position early in 1922 - a position in the Square was discounted. In the wake of the war, under the auspices of the Housing Act of 1919, the country set about building ‘homes fit for heroes’. The first of these were built in Noreuil Road, which was named after a little village of some 100 inhabitants near Arras in France. Petersfield had adopted the village to help with its reconstruction, and a letter thanking the town for gifts of parcels of clothing and coloured wall maps to brighten the schoolroom was signed by J Nicholai, the schoolmistress at Noreuil. The Electricity Supply Act of 1919 gave rise to an application by Dr R J Cross, Mr T A Crawter and Mr C W Seaward, who wanted to form a company to supply electric light to Petersfield. The plan was for a generator on land located to the rear of the Volunteer Arms (now Meon Close), with a frontage on Frenchmans Road. (Note that the company was only to supply electric light, not power). With houses having only 40-watt lamps, it is unlikely that a supply greater than 20 kilowatts would be required. Tom Crawter’s house, Clare Cross, was the first house in Petersfield to be lighted by electricity. Nevertheless, there was enough power to supply the Electric Theatre with the town’s first film shows. The first cinema stood at the corner between Chapel Street and Swan Street - in fact, the demolition of the Swan public house made way for the Electric Theatre. That first cinema was replaced by the Savoy Cinema in 1935, and is now a nightclub.
An extract from from"Petersfield - A History & Celebration".