TODAY it’s one of the busiest road junctions in Eastleigh, but in decades past it was an altogether different scene.

Even the most recent photograph of Station Hill here, taken in June 1950, feels empty, with just a couple of parked buses and two bicycles propped against the curb.

Eastleigh was first mentioned way back in 1086 and came to real prominence when the London and South West Railway Company decided to transfer its carriage works here from Nine Elms in London in 1891, followed a few years later by the locomotive works and the running sheds.

“Not unnaturally many people have come to regard Eastleigh as a railway or industrial town, but on visiting the borough many have been heard to express their surprise at the marked absence of belching chimney stacks,” wrote the Daily Echo in 1950.

The postcards below of the same scene are thought to have been taken in the 1920s and 1930s.