Ward Street
Looking at the top row, the first picture is 'old' Ward Street. There was a tennis court and poplar trees on the bend where the distant red-bricked house is now. Next is half way up Ward Street, near where I was born. The red bricked houses on the left were council-owned until the 'right-to-buy' was introduced in the 1980s and the newer houses on the right are mostly social housing. Between those is Dransfield Avenue, with old people's bungalows, leading to Victoria Street. Next picture is the nearby low building of an old people's centre, Weaver's Court, which was built after 'Airey' houses on Wilson Ave. were demolished. Top right is the lower part of Ward Street as it joins Green Road.
Green Road
Penistone is relentlessly expanding and new houses have arrived next to Rose Hill but this picture is from 2006 before they were built. Bottom left is Green Road opposite the old David Browns steelworks. Cubley Brook goes under Green Road on its way to the River Don at Springvale. There was a bad flood here in the sixties when the water rose halfway up the raised pathway to about where the roof of the parked car is. The 2007 floods did not rise as far.
Next is Green Road, towards Waddie's Shop (with its old VR postbox) with the long red-brick wall of the old David Brown's. The slope up to the right went past an old red-bricked chip shop until recently (probably demolished 2006), towards Castle Dam. Older locals will remember it as 'Winnie's Chip Shop' after the local character, Winnie Adams. She used to bite a piece off a chip to test the cooking and the other half went back in the pan. People avoided eating half chips. More recently it was nicknamed 'Chippie Geof's', after Geof Beard.
Last two pictures are new Barrat homes (2007) built on the site of the old Hitech X-Ray machine. Biffa City it aint. I remember the old tv adverts for Barrat homes where they landed a helicopter among their houses. The joke went round that the houses fell over from the downwash. Untrue of course. These new ones are called Saunderson Gardens (more like Kensington Gardens). An odd name, given that they do not appear to have any.
Towards Spring Vale
Carry on around along Green Road, past Waddies shop and you come upon another railway bridge, which now has traffic lights (but not in this picture). As a bairn, I used to walk under it to Spring Vale school. I recall the wonderful, sulphurous smell of steam engines and there was an actual working gas lamp attached to the wall with a ticking clockwork timer. It was the only one I had ever seen working for real and must have been the only one left in Penistone, or possibly Yorkshire. The VR post box of Waddies is shown here.
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Top-right picture is the view down Green Road to Sheffield Road junction from just after the bridge. This row was nicknamed 'Birdcage Walk'. Cage-like railings used to adorn each front door but many have gone now. From the same viewpoint but looking left is a new large housing estate (bottom-left) with the silly name of Green Acres.
Just beyond that is where I took the last and rather sad picture. For decades, the Working Men's Club was as a thriving institution in the area. It had comfortable seating, a games room, regular entertainment and ample car parking. Their club trips were legendary. I recall counting eight full railway coaches, chartered for one of their hugely popular seaside trips. The young ones were always given pop and crisps. For many years it was boarded up and abandoned but it was demolished in 2007 and part of the new junior school has been built there.
Update
With the relentless expansion of house-building in Penistone, some old familiar views are changing. One of these is the old red-brick wall that ran along much of Green Road It developed a hole in 2007 but it was demolished in 2009 and the large factory building behind is now revealed to the world. New houses have sprung up , such as the 'Kensington Gardens' area above and some red-bricked ones opposite Waddies' shop.
Ex-pats and older Penistonians will be unsettled at how the landscape has changed. I know that the old wall was a special feature of Green Road that a good many Spring Vale schoolkids will always remember. It stood for at least fifty years and it might have been a century. I used to walk next to that red wall every day while going to and from Spring Vale school (in the days when kids could walk freely).
The next view is the 2007 hole in the wall in all its glory from a viewpoint not far from Chippie Geof's old red-brick chip shop. Incidentally, that's another change. The old chip shop has gone and yet another house is in its place.
