Guided Tour part 3 – Northampton

By shendyNo Comments
The third part of the website is devoted to my home town, Northampton, and like the Kings Road photos is a mildly interesting piece of social history. A lot of the photos were taken in the early/mid 1970s when the centre of town was being redeveloped - the not-at-all missed bus station and suchlike. It's not all bad though as there are sets of photos from the Borough Show, the Carnival and the Raft Race in the 1970s, and plenty of photos from Abington Park, where we spent many happy days in my childhood - I expect many people will have happy memories of Gallone's ice cream. There are also plenty of photos of the canals around the town and Stoke Bruerne. I'm sure there will be plenty more photos of the town to come from the rest of the archive....
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Derngate

By shendy1 Comment
In 1977 my father took a series of photos for Northampton High School, a private school for girls that at the time was based in Derngate, as part of their centenary celebrations - a number of the images appeared in their centenary magazine. I'm not quite sure how he got the gig though - quite possibly an amateur dramatics contact....
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Abington Park 1976

By shendy3 Comments
Some shots from Abington Park in the summer of '76 The wonderful Gallone's ice cream vans, still there to this day. Is the ice cream as good as it was? The council obviously had more money than it does now, and there were various entertainments put on in the park during the summer - these are some Belgian flag wavers and a Scottish band with a drum major (or perhaps minor judging by the size of her). These are the Celebrated Ratliffe Stout Band - I know the name, but really don't know much about them apart from the fact that they came from Northampton, were a folk group and were named after a Northampton beer. Very hard to find out anything about them on t'interweb. And one of me, probably eating a Gallone's. And yes, the top is home-knitted....
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Northampton 1976

By shendyNo Comments
The long, hot summer of 1976 - sat here writing this in the wet, crappy summer of 2012. This is The Brother on a slide at Midsummer Meadow pool, about to plunge through the ice into the frigid waters. OK, I exaggerate - but not much. Mind you '76 was so hot that they might not have had to employ the ice breakers that year. And a couple of candids from the Market Square...
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