Kenilworth Past and Present

Photo Credit: Mike Musson

Having got to know a few residents who were born-and-bred in Kenilworth I've enjoyed finding out about the history of some of the buildings in town.

I've learnt that the house a few doors down was a popular fish-and-chip shop, a house over the road was hit by anti-aircraft fire from Crackley Woods in 1940 resulting the death of the owner, and the recycling centre on Cherry Orchard was formerly a large brick-works which supplied many of the bricks from which Kenilworth is built.

And the Coconut Lagoon (aka "Balti Towers") on Warwick Road apparently used to house the local House of Negotiable Affection!

Properly spicy!

To settle an argument in the office about whether the She Bar used to be the old station waiting room (apparently it wasn't, although it certainly felt like it sometimes!) I looked up a couple of local history websites and found some old pictures of Kenilworth Station.  There's currently a lot of talk about re-building Kenilworth's railway station, especially with HS2 in the news, but while I often walk along Station Road on the way into town it's hard to get a sense of there ever being a station down there.

Inspired by the blog of a Russian photographer called Sergy Larenkov (who has merged WW2 photos with more recent pictures to make some truly haunting images) and the History Pin website (which lets users overlay historic photos onto Google Maps' Street View application) I thought it'd be interesting to fire up photoshop and see how much the view has changed in the last 100 years.

After a bit of fiddling about with the software I ended up with a reasonably fair representation of how things might have looked back in 1900.  It's remarkable how unchanged many of the buildings are... with the exception of a few additional chimneys and some TV aerials the view isn't too much different to a century ago.

The back-and-white photo comes from the Warwickshire Railways website and is dated approx 1900-1910; the colour image is a recent picture taken by the Google Maps service.

It's hard to make out but according to Robin Leach (an excellent local historian who has uncovered loads of interesting info about Kenilworth's past) the office window on the house on the left reads "Walter J Lockhart, Coal and Coke Merchants, Agents to Hunt, Edmunds and Co, Brewers, Banbury".

Although it's a bit rough-and-ready this technique does help bring Kenilworth's history to life so I might try to dig out some higher-quality images and see what other locations around town might lend themselves to it.

 Kenilworth Clock Tower: 1910 vs 2010

(Source: WW2 in Kenilworth)