Eleven years on and this is my favourite old Portsmouth picture | Bob Hind

Just take a while to look at the photograph and the little girls. They are a dream aren’t they and the daughters of some proud Portsmouth couple.

I publish about 1,000 old photographs a year, many supplied by readers, but this is just about my number one.

It just about says it all, the three little girls in the safe hands of a constable crossing Commercial Road just north of the junction with Edinburgh Road with the Central Hotel in the background.

The smiles on their faces and the joy of being seen safely across the road with two horse-drawn wagons waiting for them to clear the road are all part of a long lost Portsmouth.

The constable would, no doubt, have been known by the late Eddie Wallace,a great friend of these pages, and both men part of a long gone part of the city.

• Today’s second picture is of interest because of the building in the background. It is, or was, the Lion Temperance Hotel which stood in Lion Terrace, Portsea, although the entrance seen here was around the corner in Portland Street.

At that time Lion Terrace ran from Queen Street to Park Road with Portland Street running west from the Terrace across the end of St James’s Street into Kent Street.

The pillars give it an illusion of grandeur in keeping with the buildings that stood in Lion Terrace. Note that hotel guests would have had to walk straight into the road from the steps.

The young woman with the neckerchief is of interest in that she is standing on the narrow pavement across the narrow road in front of a post box.

It is a pre-war photograph and she is not that far away from being my late mother as a young girl although she was born in 1926, a little young for the woman in the photograph. If you recognise this young woman please let me know.

Just behind the post box is the muzzle of a ship’s cannon being used as a bollard.These were popular all over Portsea, buried in street corners to stop cars mounting the pavement.

• The final picture today is of women who worked in the canteen at Woolworth’s in Commercial Road, Landport, at Christmas 1962 – a time when Commercial Road was the place to shop.

Again, I or Pat Arnold who sent in the picture in, have no idea who the women are. The one on the right has a cross on the her right arm.