Following on from taking pictures of ghost signs yesterday, today I pursued another side of my photograph taking hobby by updating pictures of the past. A recent edition of Bygones centred on the change (for the worse) of our shopping habits, so armed with the paper and my camera, my dad and I had an after lunch wander around the Hyson Green area to see if we could retake a handful of photos.

We reflected on the change in communities and general habits that have happened in the last sixty years. Walking around residential areas with little or no trace of the lifestyle that we used to know, it’s remarkable to think that these changes were drip fed in to society and were considered the norm before anyone had the time to realise. You can see the new brickwork covering a shop doorway that was turned back into a house, or the bigger shop that was once the local pub. A piece of Alan Sillitoe’s writing (I can’t remember off the top of my head) refers to having a pub crawl without leaving your estate, something that is virtually non-existent today.

Every corner had a shop and virtually every street had a pub on it. According to another edition of Bygones, one that featured lost pubs, told me that Nottingham once had 574 pubs. Why don’t we need them anymore? I imagine that a lot of it is to do with the fact that people tend to move away now, rather than during my grandparent’s era when leaving home meant getting a house on the next street. Another aspect is the different cultures that reside in places like Hyson Green such as Muslims who of course don’t drink alcohol. Even though pubs serve non-alcoholic drinks, the pub isn’t a way of life to them so the pub eventually closes down. The multitude of pubs reflected the fact that everyone used to go to the pub of an evening and drink during the limited time that drink was available in the days when you were kicked out at eleven o’clock. In the days before the government told us how to live healthily the idea of going to the pub at lunchtime for a couple of pints before going back to operate dangerous machinery was second nature. I can’t imagine people in call centres or supermarket shelf stackers doing that, although in the case of the Asda on Hyson Green, who would notice if the staff were pissed in the afternoon.

When my dad’s parents lived in the area, Radford Road was a decent shopping street that had everything you wanted. The concept of going into the city centre to shop was madness. The corner shop was the place you went for your day to day items, and you would be served by someone who knew your name and asked after your family. Staff in supermarkets are not trained to give a shit about you, that sentence would work if I stopped at ‘trained’. All they are interested in is your money and customer service is a dirty word.

It’s a pity that this world has gone forever, you couldn’t bring it back now even if you did it gradually as the public are conditioned to drive to the supermarket and buy lower quality items. As I always say, the public are fucking stupid.

(The photographs can be found in the ‘Nottingham Then and Now’ album on my Facebook page).

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