The Hornsey Road Baths and Laundry,Holloway Rd n Arsenal footie

Any comments? Google: "the hornsey road baths and laundry" to see this old skool illuminated sign. I like the woman diving into the pool lit up in lights. It looks good. Talking about old fashioned tings I like frontage of the Holloway Rd tube station,it's got all the old fashioned lettering reading "Holloway Rd" above the entrance to the tube station and the red colour tiles. Is it called art deco or something? I wouldn't know. Oh yes,and at Arsenal tube station deep down in the tunnel on the station platform as you get off the train they have the previous name of Arsenal tube station there written on the tiles on the platform left there from years ago ,I think it might be called Gillespe Rd,not sure,gooners will put me right. I thought someone would put their foot in at the weekend,I thought it would be on CFC shame it was on Arsenal... Anyone jumped into a london taxi on sg rd with a football and jumpers for goalposts and gone to the old Arsenal stadium the old highbury stadium now flats and played football on the grass that used to be the football pitch after a few sherberts of an afternoon?
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Comments

  • edited 5:51PM
    Fortuitously I went past the sign last night and it looked splendid. Have they only just started to light it up?
  • edited 5:51PM
    And it is Gillespie Road.
  • edited 5:51PM
    And if you think the outside of Holloway Road is nice you should check out the ticket hall - it's lovely (if you like that sort of thing).
  • edited 5:51PM
    And it's be more nouveau rather than deco.
  • edited 5:51PM
    It's me again, going back in time.

    Hornsey Road baths was/were used by SG school in the early fifties for swimming lessons. We walked there and back in all weathers, two abreast with our swimming trunks wrapped up in a towel the bundle remaining a soggy wet lump until we got back home in the lunch break or in the evening.
    The water wasn't heated, there were no warm showers and no hair-dryers - but none of us complained and as far as I can remember we didn't get colds. Nor do I suffer from rheumatism today...

    At some time, and I can't remember when, we moved onto going by coach to a school baths off of Wightmann Road. What I do remember is once returning to school after the summer holidays to find that swimming was the first activity of the new term. Non of us (boys) had our swimming things with us. The teacher (Mrs xxxxxxxx) said we should go any way and we did, while she supervised from the side, after coming out of the water we just hung around until we were dry. Imagine that today.

    Before we moved to Florence Road we lived in Newcastle, I was a small United fan. At that time the cheapest places were down by the touchline at St. James's Park. So that's where we were. Sometimes we had to jump out of the way of the players. Later, when I went to N. to visit relatives and so on we always went to the Saturday football, at that time the real hero was Jackie Milburn who scored a stunning goal at Wembley in the Cup Final.
    Naturally in SG my interest turned to Arsenal and I vaguely remember sitting there on the touchline too.

    I can't remember any hooligans but I know that there were crowds outside the pubs.
  • edited 5:51PM
    Busby, ace to see you back. Was Hornsey Rd pretty battered by 'Luftwaffe redevelopments'? Judging by the hideous stretch of post-war housing and neighbouring concrete estates... what was there before? Arky
  • edited 5:51PM
    The baths sign is rather lovely. And I remain hopeful that one day the footballists will move their horrid club back to WHERE ARSENAL ACTUALLY IS, and Gillespie Road station will throw off its slave name, and the nature reserve will no longer have to be closed at random interludes every week to avoid becoming a vomitorium.
  • edited 5:51PM
    @ADGS: slave name! That's the funniest thing I've read on here in ages... A
  • edited 5:51PM
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited 5:51PM
    Wow, had no idea there was a local connection with their one good song!
  • edited 5:51PM
    Arkady, - I walked Hornsey Road in 2008 from Seven Sisters upwards to Crouch End and was devastated by the 'architecture'.
    The war damage itself was mainly behind the left of Hornsey Road - Mitford Road, Sussex Way and thereabouts. But Hornsey Road itself remained fairly intact. This new 'architecture' can't really be called post-war because it must have taken place later than 1970 to replace terraced rows of houses that weren't exactly presentable but ten times better than the terrible things standing there now.
    We moved from Florence Road into Sussex Close in 1953, the flats were then new and had quite decent tenants although there wasn't much to be said for the 'facilities', for instance we all had our bikes in the flat and/or on the balconies. There was one good thing, they had a superb view from the higher floors - on a really good day the whole of London could be seen.
  • edited 5:51PM
    The Hornsey Road baths sign really annoys me because I wish it was still a public pool rather than fancy new flats. Keeping the sign up is just rubbing salt into the wounds.
  • edited 5:51PM
    @TNH you can get a nice poster of the diving woman in the Crouch End shop just beside the guitar place.
  • edited 5:51PM
    Those pictures in Crouch End are lovely, but hella-expensive. I went in to get one and can't remember the exact price, but I do remember that my eyes started to bleed.
  • Thanks to all: interesting comments about local history etc. The bookshop in Crouch End near the clocktower called Prospero's Books after a character in a Shakespeare play who had some magic books maybe the tempest not sure, sells a DVD that covers the history of Crouch End. The DVD was done by a local resident now aged 80.It's about £10. Worth a look. I like the clocktower in Crouch End because when you see the clocktower you know that it looked the same now as in 1895. Put up I believe in memory of a local bloke who stopped developers building on playing fields or woods or somefink like that... a sort of old fashioned version of a local councillor a sort of eco heroe. They used to call Highbury football ground the old home of Arsenal: "highbury the library" because it was such a quiet and gentile football ground compared to places like the shed at stamford bridge. London Undergound called the underground but 60% of underground train stations are not located underground but overground! Arnos Grove is art deco underground station I think any other train statons worth looking at? I agree with tosscat that the sign of the woman diving in did look good when it was illuminated last night worth going to look at. Any more local history stories at all about anything? I liked that thread about the parkland walk with photos on it of the wooden stroud green rd station a very old thread now probalby.
  • edited March 2010
    @Busby: yes, hideous isn't it? The road really has been spoiled, especially at the southern end. I spent a year living on Sussex Rd which was OK in itself, but having to walk along Hornsey Rd every day was pretty harrowing.
  • edited 5:51PM
    Highbury wasn't the *old* home of Arsenal so much as the mid-period home. The old one was in Arsenal, hence the name. They were the Wimbledon of their day and, if Milton Keynes isn't being renamed Wimbledon, why has so much of this area been renamed after Arsenal? Cafes and the like I can forgive, but the station is too much.
  • AliAli
    edited 5:51PM
    Woolwich Arsenal
  • edited 5:51PM
    From the Arsenal website (smugness abounds with them I guess)
    [blockquote] Renaming of Gillespie Road station: This is largely down to foresight of Herbert Chapman, who pushed hard for the Tube stop just behind the North Bank to be re-christened. “Whoever heard of Gillespie Road,” he said at one point in the talks. “It is Arsenal around here!”

    The idea had first occurred to Chapman when he visited the newly-relegated Arsenal in 1913 as manager of Leeds City. It took months of lobbying and the change meant that thousands of tickets, maps and signs had to be replaced. Even machinery had to be re-configured.[/blockquote]

    No doubt Mr. Chapman gave someone on the council a massive backhander to do his bidding. He was banned from the game for his part in an embezzlement scam at Leeds City (and did some club not go bust after he paid the league to ensure Arsenal promotion? Sorry, bit vague on that).

    I guess there's not much appetite in the current climate to pay for it to be renamed (though Wenger did sign a petition to have Gillespie Road reinstated), and maybe Arsenal fans would then push to get Holloway Road renamed in their honour.
  • edited 5:51PM
    As massive wastes of London Transport funds go, clearly the bendy bus of its time.
  • CatCat
    edited 5:51PM
    I agree with JaneDoe - the I'd like it still to be a pool too, it would be nice to have a swimming pool so close. I tend to go down Highbury Pool to swim at the moment.
  • edited 5:51PM
    It's fantastic to have a football Club with such rich history and Tradition on our doorsteps.
    For those of you who are are unaware Asenal dominated English football in the 1930's and only the war prevented them from continuing this. They pulled out all the stops to remain in Islington, their spiritual home when the new stadium was built.
    No other London Club has had such an impact on the football landscape.
  • edited 5:51PM
    ... except Spurs possibly.
  • edited 5:51PM
    Yes, I agree janb. Spurs have been established in their area much longer than Arsenal and have always had a bigger and better support.

    Arsenal tube station is the only one on the underground network that isn't named after a place. I think it should go back to its original geographical name
  • edited 5:51PM
    I suggest you take a walk down the Seven Sisters Road and have a look at the majesty of the area!
    As for Bigger and Better support? Can you please define your criteria for this statement.
    Arsenal get 60,00 at every home game thats why they had to build a bigger ground. Spurs get 40,000.
    When Arsenal won the league in 2004, 250,000 people turned out in Upper Street.
    I dont think many of you would have been alive the last time Spurs won the league in 1961!
  • edited 5:51PM
    Was that 2004 thing with 250,000 people a Sunday? I in Canonbury after a very strange night and in no state to deal with that many bellowing drones, and all my routes out seemed to be closed as part of the attendant crowd control. Genuinely one of the worst experiences of my London life, even above the time I went to a health food cafe and ended up vomiting blood.
  • edited 5:51PM
    Bigger as in there are more Tottenham fans and better as in they tend to be a better class of fan than your average Arsenal fan. More knowledgeable and more vociferous. Tottenham have outgrown their beautiful old stadium and are beginning the process of building a new 60,000 seater stadium which they will have no problem filling each week.
  • edited 5:51PM
    This site has been up for years and we've never really had a good Arsenal v Spurs ding-dong.
  • AliAli
    edited 5:51PM
    Spurs best player was Alan Gilzean
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