I lived on the corner of Dean Road and Johnson Street back in 1955, when I was a kid, and well remember Jacky's newsagent shop and his fiery red hair and brown overalls, and the smell of the tobacco and cigarettes he sold. There was a chippy next door to him on Dean Road and next door to him on Barnes Road was a tiny, funny old shop that seemed to sell parts of old cars and second-hand tools. That entire corner was demolished and new houses built many years ago, sadly. Jacky was a nice bloke, and a man called Sid took the shop over in roughly the mid 60's(?) and both he and his wife were very nice people. (I bumped nto Sid many years after, when I was married and living in Gateshead, where, again, he was running his own newsagents - he even remembered me, too, when I went in the shop!) On Barnes Road, a few feet down from the corner of Dean Road, there was Margaret's shop (run by her and her sister and it was the hub of the area for all it was a tiny place), Moore's corner shop and another corner shop on the opposite corner to Moore's whose name I forget (Andersons, maybe?) - it was never very busy as the woman who owned it was a bit forbidding and uncommunicative, well at least she seemed that way to kids! Moores still sold biscuits from open boxes and used to cut cheese and butter by weight from large blocks and then wrap it for you.
There was also Barnes Road School, the corner shop near it and the shop on the corner of Barnes Road and Eldon Street where I used to spend my Friday pocket money on the way home from my nana's. The school and those two corner shops have long gone, the Moores shop is now a house although the very faded sign painted on the wall above the shop is still barely readable even after all these years. The shop whose name I can't recall was converted into the local Sutton Trust office. One shop remaining from those days is the Off Licence on the corner of Barnes Road and South Frederick Street, which sells groceries too, now. I remember going in there with my Nana when she got her bottle of Brown and bottle of Amber which she sipped while babysitting my brothers and I.
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Across the road from the Off-Licence on the opposite corner were a couple of shops, but I have no idea what they were in those days. Nowadays one is a sandwich shop and the one on the corner was, until just recently, near-derelict and had been that way for years. In the middle of South Frederick street was - and is - a canny shop that hasn't changed much since those days. It's a General Dealers which still has that lovely smell old shops have, made up of soap, polish, and newspapers. At the Tyne Dock end of South Frederick Street is another corner Off-Licence/General Dealers though back when I was a kid it was probably just a General Dealers.
The place we lads played the most when we were young was right at the very end of Dean Road, across from the Post Office (which stood on the corner of Dean Road and Temple Street) and the coal merchants, and it was a large-ish patch of partly-demolished buildings and rubble, though there were a couple of buildings still there, one of which was an old chippy, though these were knocked down at the end of the 50's as I recall. We called the area of knocked-down buildings "The Bombed Buildings" (the site of the small blocks of flats today) although it's a near-certainty they weren't actually bombed buildings. No adults ever called them that! We had a great time there making dens, chucking stones through the shattered windows and exploring the ruined rooms. Further down the road, past the Post Office, was a few more terrace houses (still there) then, beyond the coal merchant's office, there was a set of double gates leading into a shabby but still quite imposing driveway, heavily shaded by old trees, and a large house that looked huge to us kids. Beyond that Dean Road curved right and the route went onward to Tyne Dock. On the actual curve was a row of shops, but they, the large secluded house and the coal merchant's office have been gone for many years now, replaced by an old folks home.
On the edge of the "Bombed Buildings" was a row of terrace houses facing the Deans Estate, which in our time was a place where Bangladeshi immigrants went to live. We never used to see any of their kids out playing in the back lanes, but they were nice people when we did bump into them. It was in those days that we started seeing one or two of their children in the local schools but there was no racism in the playground - they were kids like us, just a bit different-looking. No doubt we looked strange to them, and probably smelt strange, too, as there were no bathrooms in our houses at that time, and the outside netty was a usual feature. (I was in my mid-teens when we got a bathroom and indoor loo.) Regarding the aforementioned Deans Estate, it was a place which we never went to - we kids thought it a rough estate and in any case none of us kids were allowed there by our parents who viewed the place, and the people on it, with great disapproval.
Phew, this post ended up being longer than I thought! Before I sign off I was wondering if anyone remembers what the corner shops were on Temple Street were?