12 thoughts on “Dovecot Street c1959

  1. Does anyone have any information about the Moss family that lived on Dovecote Street & the Swainston’s that lived in Alice Street? I moved to Leeds 40 yrs ago and lost touch with most of my family. My mum Mabel Swainston married Harry Wilson.

    • Hi. Brian Mathew and Olive Bradbury were my father’s Aunt and Uncle too. My Father was Raymond Leak0. I think that makes him your cousin. We emigrated to Australia in 1958 but Dad had returned to UK for visits and spoke of Bill Bradbury.

  2. Also I think ‘Clydesdales’ was very near, if not next to Halfords, closer to the High Street, we bought our first telly from there.
    Halfords had a manager in the shop Ben Webb or as in those days Mr Ben Webb, a small bespectacled chap, bald at a youngish age who was later promoted to a larger shop and moved with his Family to Nottingham.

  3. I remember Dovecote Street like that. There was Halfords, Bells the sports shop,a curtain shop – I can’t remember it’s name, Bortners the jewellers and The White Hart pub

    • Bells was the premier sports shop in Stockton then, it was owned by the Bikerstaff family from near Yarm.

  4. I got my first new bike here when I passed the 11+ back in 1952. It was a Triumph Jack of Clubs which lasted me through my teens and early 20s. My mates and I went everywhere on bikes then, the roads were much safer for cyclists.

    • Funnily enough, I too rec’d a new bike from Halfords, when I too passed the 11+ in 1959, a ‘Phillips’ Manhattan!! It was pinched from the bike-shed where I worked in the early 70’s after I’d decided to start riding it to work, during a short-lived ‘keep-fit’ urge.

      In the centre of the photograph, ‘The White Hart’ , which once altered from it’s multi-roomed ‘traditional’ pub interior, became the popular ‘Georgia Brown’s’ in the early 1980’s. This type of ‘glitzy’ drinking establishment, then became known as a ‘fashion-bar’.

      • I recall a toy & bike (?) shop called Smarts situated along there somewhere, but I can`t see it in the photo.

      • I bought my first new bike a Herculies Frank Southall Racing Bike in 1936 out of my Sunday morning paper round for 3 Pounds 75 shillings from Halfords , 3 years later after leaving work at Ashmores my mate asked me to go and have one drink in the Bowesfield hotel with him , I thought my bike would be ok but 20 minutes later I was told my bike had been stolen.

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