The Street that became longer...

When I was a child we would often travel to visit family North of the River and our primary route over the river from Peckham was over Tower Bridge.

Apparently my mother said that her Grandmother was one of the first to cross the river when it opened …. well as a twenty one year old when it opened that makes perfect sense…



Anyway I remember looking out of the window and seeing an odd named street Shorter Street

And it was short; one building – and not even a big one.

Looking at old Ordinance Survey Maps and lining them up with Google the distance would seem too be no more than 20m.



Now that is short and it was even then no more than the length of a traffic island which is what it virtually was … 

However when you check out old maps you can see that a section of Royal Mint Street became isolated when they built Mansell Street across it to improve access to Tower Bridge and on later OS maps after it was built the old section of Royal Mint Street is unnamed.
 

Today Shorter Street's name has been attached to that “unnamed length of road and is over 90m long while the site of the “original” street I knew is now part of the widened Tower Hill carriageway, little more than a bit of carriageway crossing of Tower Hill for buses

The Death of Walter Smith 1919 Woolwich

As I say on the video  many years ago I recorded my Grandfather and his Elder sister and over the last few years I have selected a few short sections of the audio to upload as a record. 

This is a section describing the death of my Great Great Uncle Walter in Woolwich, South London, tragically within months of having survived the First World War.