Tag Dowson

Curiosity leads to unexpected stories from my little corner of the Drayton Estate.

The Mile Cross Man 6 Comments
A quiet corner of the Drayton Estate as seen from the once-empty 3 Pinder Close

A while back I wrote a piece about a house just around the corner from mine that had stood empty for a few years (click to read). This house had barely been modernised over the years, and the more I delved into the history of this one particular house, the more interesting it became. Often is the case when researching your local history, following your nose often leads you down historical alleyways that you never expected to end up in, and more often than not, they end up being more fascinating than you ever could have imagined. And it’s this kind of follow-your-nose research that the MX100 research leads, myself included, had been teaching our fellow citizen researchers as we encouraged them to dig for interesting snippets of the estate’s history for the recent Mile Cross 100 project. Another part of this process was also asking for the public to provide us with their own stories about Mile Cross.

Continue reading “Curiosity leads to unexpected stories from my little corner of the Drayton Estate.” →

Schooled at the old skool school

The Mile Cross Man 11 Comments

Over the years there have been six schools in one form or another on the Mile Cross estate.

Dowson Infant School opened on the 6th December, 1926 and received it’s first 66 students from a small and temporary, School off Brazier Road. Then on 27th January 1928 the Dowson Primary School opened next door
, bringing in a further 193 pupils, aged 7.5 to 10.5 years. This number grew to 442 pupils by July 1934, which is quite a lot when you consider that the by today’s standards the two connected schools were fairly small.

I only have this one image of the school in my photographic arsenal and it is of one of the two School halls. It’s taken after closure, but the school can still be found on some of the older versions of Google maps. This shot is of the Mile Cross Middle School Hall. In here I used to do country-dancing (against my will), play rounders, partake in gym (in your pants if you’d forgotten your kit), rearrange the words to various hymns during assembly (can you believe we were forced to sing hymns?) and later on wear out the knees of my flecked-trousers skidding along the floor to the ‘Final Countdown’ by ‘Europe’ during many a 1980’s school disco. I always used to think it was a replica of Noah’s Ark when sat cross-legged on the hard floor listening to the Head Master, Mr Keene bang on about something or other. Looking at it now, it did look a bit boat-like.Mxmx1 Continue reading “Schooled at the old skool school” →

Running from Ghosts

The Mile Cross Man 1 Comment

Just a short entry to keep things bubbling along whilst I work on a ‘War and Peace’ sized item about Mile Cross pubs…

Anybody who went to the Dowson Junior or Mile Cross Middle schools will probably remember the fabled cross-country course. It was situated behind Sloughbottom Park and on what is now the Marriott’s Way. We’d run from the School field on the opposite side of Bowers Avenue (more on the schools later), through the corner of Sloughbottom Park, up and down through a storm drain, along an abandoned railway and through a bit of woodland recently killed off by May and Baker’s pollution. There’s a reason why Mile Cross kids had a reputation for being hard little so and so’s…

The first obstacle we’d encounter was known as the ‘Big Dipper’, which basically meant running through a gap in the fence and into (and back out of) the storm drain. This storm drain appears from the ground near Sweetbriar Indutrial estate and runs along, behind the park, behind the Council Recycling Centre (The tip) and Anderson’s Meadow before depositing all its oily surface run-off water into the Wensum, just behind the new Aldi (former Wickes site). It was full of oil, water, rubbish and god-knows-what, and it was advisable to jump over, rather than run through it. The second obstacle we’d encounter would be to run down another steep hill and onto the former M&GN trackbed. This wasn’t the neatly-trimmed path we know now, but the remains of a railway that had only recently had the sleepers removed. It was overgrown, full of nettles and was often littered with the burnt-out wrecks of stolen cars (the 1980’s was blighted by ‘joyriding’). We’d travel West along the old track-bed before taking a right at the Sweetbriar Road bridge and into the next obstacle: A dead, hilly bit of woodland, full of dead Silver Birch trees – reeking of chemicals – which then lead us back into Sloughbottom Park through another hole in the fence.

A couple of stories stick in my mind from the Cross Country run:

My schoolmate at the time: Billie (William) took a tumble down the big-dipper and broke his hip. For reasons unknown to me, his mother quickly appeared on the scene with a rickety, old push-chair which was used as a makeshift stretcher to wheel him back across Sloughbottom Park and off to the hospital; the agonised moans coming from his mouth as he was bounced across the grass in that pushchair (that was far too small for him) still stick in my mind and to this day and I often wonder where he is now.

The ‘Big Dipper’:

MXdipper Continue reading “Running from Ghosts” →