Vintage Views with Aled Jones: Step into the past along Garrison Street
Fancy a stroll down Memory Lane, elegant isn’t it? Here is Garrison Street c.1908 with Cliff Terrace on the right.
Sadly all the right hand side has been lost. Despite the hot sunshine dress remains formal!
Looking up Garrison Street from Prince Street, many changes have taken place in Garrison Street. Ice-cream parlours and amusement arcades now dominate where a wide variety of businesses used to operate, including tobacconists, jet and china stockists, confectioners, fruiterers, photographers, cafés, restaurants and news and stationers.
Cliff Terrace comprised a long row of fine late C18th buildings. The whole block was demolished after the adjoining Victoria Rooms burnt down in 1933.
When the Birmingham-based photographer took this image he was stood on Prince Street just in front of Foley’s restaurant (now Papa’s fish and chips). After Foley’s ceased trading in 1919 the business became ‘Mr Snaps’ and will be remembered by many as the point from which they collected their holiday snapshots.
For many years there was a steep slipway down to the Wharf from Prince Street, near what is now Goodwins, but this was levelled out in about 1890.
Our town has been visited by many famous people. Charlotte Brontë stayed in a lodging on Garrison Street in 1839 during her visit.
She was completely overcome by her first sight of the sea at Bridlington.
On the left the quoined building appears to have a sunblind in the window; it is now occupied by ‘Harbour Delights’, an ice-cream shop. The next business up Garrison Street is a photographers. Note the sign in the window advertising ‘Midget Pictures 12 for a shilling’. These were the ‘passport sized’ portrait photographs of the Edwardian era.
Building behind lady holding the parasol is the famous Waterloo Café, owned by Jack Grantham; it was there that the Waterloo Pierrots dressed for their shows.
An inn, the Sheffield Arms, stood in a yard to the far left of the image and was reached by a passage that still exists today. It closed just before the First World War.
The Edwardian postcard reveals an unfiltered snapshot of daily life, offering a nostalgic window into the past. Written in ink it was sent to a Miss Alice Adams of Canal Side, in Chester.
In the early days Garrison Street (which, as it sounds, once had a garrison at the end of the road!) was primarily dedicated to housing, rather than bustling commercial shops or leisure facilities.