NOSTALGIA: Portsmouth street demolished for motorway

Garibaldi Street in the late 1950s. The Methodist church is on the right.

My grandmother’s and uncles’ houses, which I knew from childhood scattered around Southsea and Milton, also remain intact.

I’m lucky for I can return to these places that have very fond memories for me.

So I have often wondered how people who lived in a house for years only to be told they had to move out as their property was to be compulsorily purchased coped with it.

NOW: Garibaldi Street, gone and long forgotten except by those who lived there. The M275 is on the left.Picture: Bob Thompson

Never again would they be able to return to the places of their childhood. They would become no more than a memory with perhaps just a photograph to remind them of days of happiness.

Bob Thompson, of Milton, loaned me the picture above of Garibaldi Street, Rudmore, from the late 1950s.

It is not unlike so many terraced streets in the city with houses dating back to before the First World War, maybe into the late 19th century. It is where he spent his formative years.

At the end of the street can be seen the Methodist church which fronted Twyford Avenue.

When I was at school in the 1960s boys did metalwork and woodwork and girls learned to cook and type.
By 1975 that had all changed, I am glad to say, and here we see lads from the City of Portsmouth Boys School at Hilsea showing off their Christmas cakes.
They had entered a competition to find the best.
Are you one the boys here? Perhaps you won the competition? — When I was at school in the 1960s boys did metalwork and woodwork and girls learned to cook and type. By 1975 that had all changed, I am glad to say, and here we see lads from the City of Portsmouth Boys School at Hilsea showing off their Christmas cakes. They had entered a competition to find the best. Are you one the boys here? Perhaps you won the competition?

At the western end of the street was Sea View which in turn ran between Rudmore Road and Silverlock and Tipner streets.

All of what can be seen was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for the M275 and Rudmore roundabout.

In the colour photo I have marked where Garibaldi Street would have been.

Where the car is on Twyford Avenue is roughly where the Methodist church stood. It’s a vastly different world from where Bob Thompson and his pals grew up, a world most would never have thought possible.