SOUTHAMPTON’S two most important open spaces feature in a special Daily Echo air photograph taken in 1953, which centres the well-known island where Winchester Road and Burgess Road meet below the Hill Lane inter-section.
The Hill Lane crossing was the site of the proposed roundabout to break up traffic on this very busy spot back then in the fifties.
The thick woodlands of the Common are easily identified.
At the top left-hand corner are the bowling greens of the Sports Centre, and, the other side of the trees, some of the cricket and football pitches and tennis courts.
The large buildings, left centre, are those of Hollybrook Children’s Homes.
This photograph gives a clear idea of what a difference trees make to a landscape and how bare and uninteresting a treeless town would be.
PICTURED: Winchester Road and Burgess Road in 1953
- RIGHT in the heart of Southampton, on what was once one of the town’s worst slum districts, a modern and model “village” of flats was rising up in the Kingsland area of the city back in 1952.
Nearly 100 flats and 38 houses were going up; with some of them are already occupied by the time this picture was taken.
South Front is in the foreground, which at the time was described as an “airy and pleasant colony of new homes complete with its own nursery school.
The second photograph offers an alternative view of the development, showing the well planned flats on the new Kingsland Housing Estate in the foreground, with the Civic Centre, standing as a proud sentinel, beyond the trees in the background.
PICTURED BELOW: The Kingsland estate in 1952
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