Forty years ago today
Aug. 29th, 2015 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dormouse1953The summer of 1975 I was living in London but working in Guildford, having been seconded to the Guildford office by the CEGB. I was living in Bowden Court, a hostel in Notting Hill run by the London Hostel Association originally designed to house civil servants newly moved to London. (It's still there, but by their website, it seems they cater now more for foreign language students.)
This was a handy location for the Proms and that summer I had a season ticket. A gallery season ticket, and not arena, which I preferred. I guess they'd run out of arena tickets by the time I booked.
August 29th was a Friday, and according to my diary I had to go back to Notting Hill to pay my rent. Most nights, I used to go directly to the Albert Hall from Waterloo station. This meant I got to the hall later than usual, but the gallery never completely fills up.
The concert was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its newly appointed chief conductor Rudolf Kempe. This was his last ever Prom concert and possibly one his last with the orchestra as he died the following May. (He was due to conduct the 1976 opening night of the Proms.)
The concert ended with Dvorak's New World symphony and afterwards I came down from the gallery and walked home. My standard route was to walk west along Kensington Road to Kensington High Street and there to turn north up Kensington Church Street to Notting Hill. Kensington Church Steet kinks about 150 metres north of Kensington High Street, suddenly turning west and then curving round to its original direction. I was walking round this curve when I suddenly heard a loud bang. I'd been living in London long enough to know what that meant.
As I came out of the bend I could see a lot of activity at the north end of the street and when I got there, the whole north end had been cordoned off. I later discovered that a bomb had been left in the doorway of a shoe shop near the northern end of the street, and a bomb expert examing it had been blown up and killed. This was one of a whole series of bombs that had been left near stations on the Central Line.
The police were not letting people through the cordon, not surprisingly. However, they were sending people down a side street going west - Kensington Place, according to Google maps. What I don't think they realised was that if you then took the next turning north, which I did, following the people in front of me, you go up a back alley behind the shops. That area was covered in broken glass. Presumably when the bomb exploded, it blew out all the windows at the back of the shop. What's more, that alley came out on to the main road inside the police cordon on Notting Hill Gate. The police at that end of the cordon were none too pleased to find a stream of people inside their cordon, but we weren't detained and I made my way home.
The next night, I was walking the same route back from the Proms - now no longer cordoned. There were police stopping people all along the street asking them if they'd seen anything the previous night.
This was a handy location for the Proms and that summer I had a season ticket. A gallery season ticket, and not arena, which I preferred. I guess they'd run out of arena tickets by the time I booked.
August 29th was a Friday, and according to my diary I had to go back to Notting Hill to pay my rent. Most nights, I used to go directly to the Albert Hall from Waterloo station. This meant I got to the hall later than usual, but the gallery never completely fills up.
The concert was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its newly appointed chief conductor Rudolf Kempe. This was his last ever Prom concert and possibly one his last with the orchestra as he died the following May. (He was due to conduct the 1976 opening night of the Proms.)
The concert ended with Dvorak's New World symphony and afterwards I came down from the gallery and walked home. My standard route was to walk west along Kensington Road to Kensington High Street and there to turn north up Kensington Church Street to Notting Hill. Kensington Church Steet kinks about 150 metres north of Kensington High Street, suddenly turning west and then curving round to its original direction. I was walking round this curve when I suddenly heard a loud bang. I'd been living in London long enough to know what that meant.
As I came out of the bend I could see a lot of activity at the north end of the street and when I got there, the whole north end had been cordoned off. I later discovered that a bomb had been left in the doorway of a shoe shop near the northern end of the street, and a bomb expert examing it had been blown up and killed. This was one of a whole series of bombs that had been left near stations on the Central Line.
The police were not letting people through the cordon, not surprisingly. However, they were sending people down a side street going west - Kensington Place, according to Google maps. What I don't think they realised was that if you then took the next turning north, which I did, following the people in front of me, you go up a back alley behind the shops. That area was covered in broken glass. Presumably when the bomb exploded, it blew out all the windows at the back of the shop. What's more, that alley came out on to the main road inside the police cordon on Notting Hill Gate. The police at that end of the cordon were none too pleased to find a stream of people inside their cordon, but we weren't detained and I made my way home.
The next night, I was walking the same route back from the Proms - now no longer cordoned. There were police stopping people all along the street asking them if they'd seen anything the previous night.
