Andrew Gilhooley's Blog

A little while ago, I was in my local branch of Trader Joe’s supermarket and happened to mention to the young woman scanning my groceries that at one time the store used to share the building with a branch of Blockbuster Video. She said that she had heard about it, but could not remember it as she was a child when Blockbuster closed and Trader Joe’s took over the whole space.

I said that she probably couldn’t even find a photograph of the old store online to see what it looked like, as who would take a picture of Blockbuster, unless someone had their photograph taken outside the store on their first or last day of work.

Afterwards, I was curious and did a little bit of searching, and I eventually did find a photograph of Trader Joe’s and Blockbuster. Here it is, from Charles Hathaway’s website, which features photographs of commercial buildings and is well worth a look. (Incidentally, Vito’s Italian restaurant is also gone – it’s a Thai place now.)

More recently, someone on the Pictorial Hebburn Facebook group, of which I am a member (you’ll need a Facebook account to be able to view the link) posted a question about the street map that used to be at the junction of Hall Road and Victoria Road West. It had a row of buttons listing local landmarks like the Council Offices and Library, and when you pushed a button, the place lit up on the map. It was itself a fondly-remembered local landmark for people of a certain age.

She asked if anyone had a photograph of the map. I recently wrote about this map in my blog post about the Newtown Shopping Centre – no photographs of it have so far turned up anywhere, though a question about it shows up on Hebburn-related websites and Facebook groups at least every year or so.

One member of Pictorial Hebburn posted the very wise comment that back in the 1970s photography was a relatively expensive pursuit, and “we didn’t use our precious film on the everyday things that we look back on now and wish we had”.

This in turn put me in mind of when a friend of mine was preparing to leave London in the 1990s for a job on Merseyside, he went around taking photographs of the sights he saw on his way to work every day, as someone had told him that they would be the things he would probably miss.

If you own a modern mobile phone, photography is an almost-zero-cost pastime today. (If you want proof, just look at the number of photographs of food people post online. In the pre-digital world, would anyone waste film taking photos of their lunch to show to their friends?) I hope that this means there are more pictures being taken that capture all the everyday things and places that people will want to remember years from now when they are gone.