Longford (inc. The Red Hills)

Hi all At the time that the D-Di vans were parked in Longford, they were in the process of being sold to independent ice-cream entrepreneurs, as D-Di had ceased trading & had vacated their production depot in Broad St. Hope that helps. The end of an era for Coventry ice-cream.

Hi there, this is a long shot, I am doing a life book for my mum, she will be 73 this October 2014. Born 1941 Margaret Garner and lived at 17 Woolgrove Street, Longford. Her mother/my grandmother was Hilda Garner (died about 1971 I think) and her father/my grandfather Reg Garner, and he lived there until he died I think approx 1984. He was a large gentleman, rode a push bike and had a large football shaped hernia in his stomach... That's all I can remember.... My mother has 2 sisters, Sheila Garner now Sheila Hill, approx 82 years old, Brenda Garner now Brenda Tobin-Dougan, approx 78 years old, and their brother Frank Garner who died approx 30-35 years ago approx aged 68???. My mum used to work at the cinema on Windmill Road when she was approx 17!! Another memory jog for anyone is that my mum had a brain tumor around the age of 13/14 roughly I think, so at the age of 15 had a very short crew cut/balding head as her hair grew back from the operation?.. She met my dad when they both worked together at the cinema there when she was 15 and he was 17 - Malcolm Simpson, his dad was a barge builder, Simpson's Barges at Canal Cottage, Sutton Stop area I think, not sure.. If anyone has any old photos of the area or knows anything about the family that would be great. Any help will be greatly welcomed or if anyone knew the family.

Hi & welcome to our Coventry forum, Prioryjo Many of our members have links with Longford, so let's hope that your shot is not so long. Please enjoy your time with us.

Hello, my name is Jeff and I live in one of the topshops on Hurst Road - at No7 - the one still with its original (blue) front door. I'm in need of any photographs that shows these buildings before they were made over into modern dwellings, no matter how unclear they are or how far off they were taken. They need to show the original windows, because I'd dearly like to build and install replacements for our house that are as near as dammit the same as they were when originally built. I know roughly what kind of windows they were. Just not exactly. This is how the houses are now ~ And this is what I think they would have looked like right now if they hadn't been so disastrously tampered with... I know which of the both I'd prefer. It was once a unique early industrial building - there are some remaining like it in Lower Holyhead Road, and similar in Far Gosford Street, and they are charming - but they're not quite as monumental, are they?

Hello Jeffhatt in Longford & welcome to our forum. Thank you for your post & pictures. Please enjoy your time with us.

Now I passed that row many times as a boy - a little further along down Hurst Road was the building that housed the St John's Ambulance Brigade, which met once a week, perhaps more. There are two quite utilitarian-looking buildings surviving there, either of which might be the building to which I refer. I believe the building belonged to St Thomas's, parishioner activities certainly went on in the building; however, I do not know the ownership answer as a matter of FACT. Your row looks altogether more charming than it did in my day, but you are right in your assessment that it would look even better with a reproductions of the original top-shop windows installed. It would be even more striking a row. The top-shops on Lower Holyhead Road are superb examples of the city's early-industrial past. I lived opposite this row in 1965 through 1967 before I headed-off to Toronto. In those days, as memory serves, the row was owned by the Co-op. A first-rate first contribution by Jeffhat to this site.

TEKMELF - sorry to have been distracted enough to have ignored your assertion, but - upon recollection - your assertion is entirely accurate. Of course, the chant from the kids exiting the cinema was : Dan, Dan, the ice cream man. Thank you for setting me straight on this matter.

Longford Lad, Yes, the red brick building is owned by the St Thomas church. I ran an art gallery there for three years but we couldn't make it pay so in the end we closed. I think it was once a library? The building between there and our house was once the village forge, I believe...

I used to walk past those houses regular on the way to school never even noticed that big windows had been bricked up and replaced.

H, Jeff - The Longford branch of the Coventry Public Library in the late-40s, when I first obtained a library card at age six or seven (maybe older, so perhaps into the 50s), was on Windmill Road immediately behind the Dovedale/Rivoli/Ritz/Dovedale cinema. My Google Maps street view tell me that the Kaleidoscope Day Nursery now occupies that site. It is not, however, the same building; in fact, it looks not unlike so much of Coventry architecture of the 1960s The Longford branch was housed in what seemed to me at the time a new-ish building - a redbrick, perhaps from the 20s/30s - and was rather grim in appearance, inside and out. It was a two-storey structure, as I recall, but I never had occasion to go upstairs, for the ground floor contained everything of interest to me, whether I was in the library on my own account or picking up something for Mam to read - often a thriller by Denis Wheatley, a popular writer of that time, now largely forgotten. After leaving secondary school, I began using the Central branch of the library, never visiting the Longford library again, but it seems to me possible that the St Thomas building may well have acted as a library at some point, for the deceptively-spacious Hurst Road building could have suited the purpose. I married in 1964, leaving Longford for a more central flat on Gloucester Street (off the Upper Holyhead Road). For all that I did not leave Coventry for good until 1967, I have never returned to Longford for anything but the briefest of stays, and certainly never long enough to take in anything more than the various changes in owners, tenants and managers. (That much would be down, no doubt, to the company I kept.) Though a recent (2012) member of the Historic Coventry site, it was here I discovered that The Saracen's Head was no longer a pub, that The Griffin had gone, and - quite recently learned - that The New Inn was no more. I love the idea of the forge being next door to you, but I do not recall that building well; rather, I remember that there was a fish & chip shop somewhere along there, not far from where you live. It did not open every evening as fish shops now do, for these were the days of rationing and post-rationing, and often no fish were available to fry. I remember the thrill of going one evening into that chipper and asking if there were any chips left, and - upon being assured there were - telling the man behind the counter that he had only himself to blame for making so many. I thought this a highly original joke, never to be repeated by anyone, never having been made before. I was quite distraught to discover soon after that - on that very evening that I had cracked that joke - pretty well every chipper in Coventry - nay, in England - had heard that joke, and would hear it again and again, had heard it all their fish/chip frying days. Sorry to hear of your disappointing experience with the art gallery, though I'm sure you learned a great deal from such an adventure. Such is the world of art. People love art, they just don't want pay for it. As I write, on the ground floor of my townhouse (a row-house terrace house like yours, but far more recent), in a music room that boasts a formidable stereo system, a parlour grand piano (the dimensions of which are somewhere between a "baby" and a "concert"), a couple of thousand CDs and as many books, I note with regret that of the sixteen picture adorning the walls of the room, only one item is an original, a pastel portrait (1939) of my wife's late aunt, the signed Harry Kernoff, R.H.A. (a Dublin artist) wood-cut print not really counting as original, no more than a signed print of a work by the American primitive, Emile White (good buddy of Henry Miller) could. Of course, I have an original clay sculpture by Ron Morgan - a gift from the Coventry artist/potter. Come to think of it, the Kernoff, too, was a gift from the artist, in this case to my wife's late parents on their wedding day. In the living-room above we do better, with one original in oils (Bahaslav Barlow, a Yorkhire artist), another Kernoff, but an original wood-cut not a print (a portrait of W.B. Yeats), and several line drawings by various talented artists of lesser standing, some dead, some alive. An art-lover I am, but certainly no patron, no buyer. Please forgive me for this lengthy ramble, largely generated by admiration for what the village has become in recent years, the people it has attracted and kept. It plainly is no longer the village of my childhood, and all the better for it! I think it was Midland red who shared with us all photographs he has taken of the place he calls Costa Del Longford. In my day I did little more than moan and groan, then leave. Subsequent generations clearly had more imagination than I possessed/possess. It is late here, and I am trusting to luck that this post needs no editing.

Hi, I do so remember the cinema but I always knew it as the "Dovedale" walked by it every day on my way to school in Windmill Road, and as I got older the back row was always the best, but when I was in that area last July I was disappointed to see how they had let it go, please don't pull it down its our history, Its good to see the black pad is still there, us to go through to Partridge Croft dance, they were the good days. The black Pad by the old Gas works I see is still there, many a time I've walked up there, but these are just memories of a long time ago, I remember losing my ring in Longford Park while playing on the see saw, and having to go to the Co-op at the corner of Windmill Road our number was 9915, how could I forget that. Marg

Marg - How could you forget your Mam's Co-op number? Well, the answer is you did notI. In the early-70s to mid-70s I owned a house in a small community that had but four digits for telecommunications within that community. Those four digits turned out to be the same four digits as my Mam's co-op number. More recently, after five years living outside of Canada, I returned and was offered a choice of numbers from my cellular phone service. The first three numbers (of ten) were pre-determined, but for the middle three I was offered a choice, and again for the final four. Well, I chose my Mam's Co-op numbers from memory without a second's hesitation for the final four digits. Cheers to you for sharing your Longford experiences.

New to this forum. Longford brings great memories for me because I used to go roller skating at the capitol rink known mainly as Longford skating rink. I went there nearly every day of the week including two to three sessions on a Saturday all through the 1960s to about 1973ish. I also worked there repairing the skates. Mr & Mrs Haywood had it for quite a long time. They used to allow me & a couple of us to go over the Saricens pub every Thurday night to watch top of the pops & go back after a pint. Also it changed hands a couple of times, the last owner was the late Les Allen, also there was a cafe a few buildings down, we used to go in there after the rink till about twelve at night. He used to buy the latest records on his jukebox. We would play them. Quite a few of us went in there we bought tea etc. We also went to the New Inn pub sometimes, we went in the late night dance it had several names over the years & we used to go over the cinema for the matinees they also had a disco on in there. What great memories. I myself was not a Longford resident but as said spent a lot of time there I was from Bell Green.

LongfordLad, When I picked Longford Lad as my username last July, I did not know that LongfordLad already existed. But we have a lot more in common than just the similar usernames. I also remember the old Dovedale cinema before it became the Ritz. Especially the Saturday morning matinee. The Capitol skating rink was also regular hang-out. I used to use the library on Windmill Road a lot in the 50's and early 60's. I can remember shopping in the Co-op on the corner of Windmill Road and my mother's "divi" number was 9167 and my Grandmother's 732 which must have made it one of the early ones. I remember how they used to write the number and the value of the purchase on a little yellow ticket. In the 60's I used to go to hear the Jazz at the Pilot on Monday nights with some colleagues from work. I am so glad you brought this up brought this up because I have been trying to remember the name of the pub for weeks. I am sure our paths must have crossed in Longford.

Reading this has finally decided me to put pen to paper so to speak after reading the forum for many years.I also used to go to Longford skating rink in the early seventies and for a while worked with Pete repairing skates.A group of us would go from Holbrooks via Judds Lane and the redhills(wouldn't fancy doing that now).We also went to disco's at the New Inn,Griffin and the Engine