The Kingstanding digital memory archive
The memories that made our community.
Kingstanding isn’t just roads, buildings and estates. It’s the people who lived here, worked here, went to school here, fell in love here and built their lives here.
Memory of the week
Alan Hitchman · 1950s · The Odeon
Walked to the matinee from about ten years old, with his younger sister — cowboy films, cartoons, Flash Gordon serials. Remembers “a big foyer” and an organ that “popped up some…
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Richard Wall · 1940s · The Odeon
Attended the matinees in 1944, singing along to lyrics projected with a bouncing ball, children tipping up the seats during the action scenes.
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Veronica Marshall · 1950s · The Odeon
A regular at the Saturday matinee — Roy Rogers and Trigger, Gene Autry — who once lost her teddy bear when a friend borrowed it during a screening. Years later she used the cine…
Read the full memoryEvery part of Kingstanding life has its stories. Pick a theme — and if yours isn’t told yet, tell it.
Martin Brookes · 1970s · The Odeon
Remembers the building becoming a bingo hall around 1973 and running until 1999; his grandparents Annie and Edward Raven of Esher Road went regularly.
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Terry Jay · 1960s · The Odeon
Went as a child with his sisters, buying sweets from Mores sweet shop beforehand — and later worked in the very same building as a bingo caller in 1966.
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Angela Cotgrave · 1930s · The Odeon
Her grandmother Edith worked as an usherette in the cinema’s early days, and lived on Brockwell Road.
Read the full memoryA sentence or a story, a photograph in a drawer — every memory added here is one that won’t be lost. A real person reads every submission before anything is published.
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