One other thing, long since gone, is the lawn tennis club at Brookside. It was downhill, behind Stanhill Street, across the brook from where Metcalf's was later built. Two courts, club house. Was hard to visualise how good it looked, when l was playing out there twenty years later. When all you could make out was the strange flatness, where the courts had once stood.
Incidentally playing tennis there, on the film taken in 1958, is another Accrington Grammar School old boy, Michael McCann. Later founder of one of this country's largest chain of 'adult lifestyle' stores, and first chair of that Adult Industry Trade Association, political activist, and friend to the rich and famous...and my landlord, for my first four years in London.
Odd what comes out of a Methodist youth and tennis club.
