As time goes by

Davina Dewar considers the changing face of Ealing

Above: Ealing Common St

In just a couple of centuries, some aspects of our city have changed beyond recognition, but it’s one of the charms of this part of town that so much of its historic architecture still survives. One need only raise one’s gaze above the level of the uniform, plastic and neon-decked shop frontages of today’s bustling Broadway to see countless echoes of Ealing’s original Victorian townscape, even if some vistas are rather harder to appreciate behind the plethora of street ‘furniture’ and, of course, the serried ranks of cars and buses!

The prosperous suburb of Ealing grew up around a clutch of villages, of which few visible traces remain. But the Victorian and Edwardian building boom that accompanied the expansion of the railways and influx of the burgeoning middle classes gave rise to a town centre of smart, spacious dwellings and stylish, awning-covered shopping streets. The names of two entrepreneurs became synonymous with prosperous, 19th and 20th century Ealing: Sayers and Sanders. They both started life as drapers but both became proprietors of handsome department stores, facing each other across the Broadway: Mr Eldred Sayers’ on the north side, Mr John Sanders’ on the south.

Sayers was founded first, in 1837, and expanded to occupy a whole block on the corner of Spring Bridge Road. By 1910 its main building had been topped with a stylish dome; perhaps it was to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ or, rather, Mr Saunders, who’d arrived on the scene in 1865 and whose main building opposite originally towered over its rival! In the 1950s Sayers conceded to Bentall’s of Kingston. Sanders’ empire, meanwhile, swallowed up the opposite corner site, by the 1930s winning the accolade of ‘the finest modern store in the western suburbs’. German bombs devastated the store in 1944 though Sanders continued in rebuilt premises through the 60s. Ealing’s great Victorian department stores now house, respectively, the Arcadia Centre and Marks & Spencers, neither a patch on their predecessors for architectural style.

Looking west along the Broadway from the site of the historic Feathers Hotel, now the Townhouse pub, one can see how the streetscape has suffered from the vicissitudes of rebuilding, not least that occasioned by the IRA bomb of 2001. Christchurch’s spire still rises above the roofs as it did in this 1887 view, but many of the Victorian and Edwardian frontages have been lost. The High Street’s buildings have fared rather better; though in 1910 pedestrians dared to stroll down the middle of the road, which few of us would do today, and the awnings have mostly disappeared, the elegant bay windows and ornate brickwork of the upper storeys remain and today’s rich mixture of shops still draw just as many enthusiastic customers.

The great instigators of change and harbingers of all this middle class affluence in Ealing were the railways and the area benefited from a variety of new lines and stations springing up after the GWR first arrived in the 1830s. Commuter travel has changed more than the townscape – early photographs of stations such as North Ealing show it standing in fields as late as 1902; others show both platforms and carriages wonderfully uncrowded compared to today’s rush hour. It was the Ealing extension of 1879 that really put W5 on the railway map, connecting Turnham Green with a new terminus at Haven Green and boasting a journey time to Mansion House of 43 minutes. Haven Green became the transport hub of central Ealing: its adjacent bus stops were as busy as today’s, even though the cab rank now welcomes taxis rather than horse-drawn carriages! Many of the old shops facing the green have given way to restaurants but their handsome façades remain, while the trees planted on the green in late Victorian times have beautifully enhanced a once-sparse area of land – proving that some views, at least, have changed for the better over the centuries!

Sources and further reading: Ealing and Hanwell Past (£15.95 h/b) and The Ealing Book (£14.95 p/b), both by Peter Hounsell and published by Historical Publications