Tower Street

When looking for photos it pays to think laterally. What you want might be in the background of something else eg there might be a photo of the clearance done for widening Leicester Street that captures part of the remaining Tower Street. Properties that were good before the war sustained such damage that while they had to be occupied for a while, they immediately jumped onto the slum list, due to the bombing. I did look at some of the reports detailing the slum clearance but I'd not spotted any photos in the later editions. There are a lot of loose photos of post war streets like Spon Street and Bishop Street and other photos in reports at the Herbert but I wasn't looking for streets like Tower Street, so if they were there I'd have skipped over them.

Thanks Helen I'm really looking for my granddad's bakery at no 18, opposite the Hope & Anchor pub and across an entrance to a court from the Beehive, the other pub in Tower St; it seems to have been a really salubrious area! I don't have a lot of hope, not least because photos were expensive then and I doubt these streets were particularly photogenic; if my impression is right, they wouldn't have been far off slums before they were bombed.

Hi Dave, have you seen the 1960 newspaper article with a picture of your grandad crossing children across Red Lane ?