ABC Wednesday - A is for...

...Austin

The sight of this fairground ride really made me smile on Sunday. The attention to detail is fantastic: the little cars, the petrol pumps, the cashiers area - it all just looks totally right. It also took me right back to my childhood as living in Northfield (if you click on the link, there's a couple of photos of the church where NAH I got married), we were in earshot of 'The Austin' factory in Longbridge. I always knew when it was five o'clock as we would hear the horn sounding the end of the afternoon shift. Whilst I believe this make of car was never made, it reminds me of the A40 - my next door neighbour had one and her black model is one of my earliest memories of cars.

My family has quite a few associations with 'The Austin' too - one of my uncles was an electrician at the factory and my dad worked at Triplex, the company supplying car windscreens. When I was little, my gran (mum's mum) lived in the Austin Village at Turves Green in one of the prefab houses built to house workers drafted in for the war effort. The link shows you the kind of house she lived in (these are preserved), but sadly hers was demolished as part of the vast swathe of city suburban redevelopment that swept Britain in the 60s/70s and she ended up on the 24th floor of a high rise tower block, ironically with a view of the street light that used to be outside her house. With the demise of the British car industry and final closure in 2005, it's now the turn of the factory itself to be demolished (you may be more familiar with it in its British Leyland brand) and it's now mostly an enormous 470 acre pile of rubble I pass just after turning off the M5 on the way to see my mum. However, the phoenix may still rise from the ashes...

Mrs Nesbitt has set up a new blog to show all ABC posts for Round 3 - so do hop over there and take a look!