Today Shirley is one of Southampton's busiest districts.

In previous decades Shirley was a very different place. The pace of life was much slower, it was still safe for children to play in local streets and a penny tram ticket took you all the way from Shirley to the floating bridge that linked the town, as it was then, with Woolston.

With a history that can trace its roots back across the distant centuries the suburb even has a mention in the Doomsday Book valuing "Shirlei'' at just 100 shillings (£5).

Over the years the area grew in importance with the 18th century seeing the development of Shirley Manor House on the site of a medieval building. By 1880 this house had become Alexandria College for Girls where now Regent's Park Girls' School stands.

In 1900 work started on the building of a large hospital at Shirley Warren, which opened as the Shirley Warren Infirmary.

Then it was on the isolated, windswept heights of the warren, where, by the late 1920s, it was known as the Borough General Hospital and today the original site has been swallowed up by the sprawling Southampton General.

There are probably few who can still recall the old Southampton Roller Rink close to Janson Road that was used as a prison camp for Germans during the First World War.

The former Atherley cinema building remains today as a bingo hall and while traces of the Regent picture house can still be seen all remains of the Rialto and the earlier Electric have now gone.

In the early 1920s trams provided the means of transport from the terminus at Anglesea Road and Newman Street to the Clock Tower, New Road and later to the floating bridge.

In the 1930s Turner's grocery store, with its slogan "Come to AET for your TEA'' and Brook's Haberdashery, which even had its own floor-walker, were open for business between Park Street and Marlborough Road.