From the fascinating Plunketts website, which is well worth an hour of your time, a colour image of Norwich City’s then brand-new stadium at Carrow Road in 1935.
There are some surprises here – at least, they would come as surprises to the good-old-days crowd, but I doubt that anyone who visits here would count themselves such. A full car park; the contrast between the “modern” stand and the crude embanked terracing; the piece from a steam locomotive cab dumped against a lean-to in the right foreground. Less surprising is the uniform browns, blacks and greys of the fans’ clothing.
That last point is of course merely a function of the most widely available cloths and dyes of the time. But it’s one thing that seems to carry over from the more familiar black and white photography of the 1930s.
Practically all that we have left of the period now is black and white. So it can be strange to reflect that, in the 1930s, only film and still photography, a tiny corner of most people’s lives, were monochrome. Absolutely everything else was in colour, and that all of the time.
What an amazing picture. Supports that argument I was making about the 1930s consumer society looking a bit like the 1950s. There do seem to be a remarkable number of cars parked very close together (although that is the shorter side of the pitch, isn’t it?) – I looked up the statistics and by 1939 there were 2m cars, so I think probably about 1.75m in 1935, which is roughly 1/20 adults, though of course the distribution would be skewed.
I dare say that they drew support from quite a wide area of Norfolk. So people would drive.
Mind you, surprisingly few traaaactors there.
At least they’ve got the weather for it over there in 1935. It’s tipping it down here.
Tractors is Ipswich, Bill. Mind you, I grew up on the edge of East Anglia, and it’s tractors virtually everywhere there.
I’ve just realized, incidentally, that we are assuming that the car park is related to the football ground. The cars are not only parked very close together: they are brand spanking new. Which suggests to me, given that Carrow Road was close to the railway and to an industrial area, that what we have read as supporters’ cars are in fact laid up at a distribution depot ready to go out to dealers all across the area.
They’re also all parked in the same direction, which would be fine if they’d been directed together to one side of the car park from an entry road, but if that was the case, why are some of the spots nearest the camera (in which direction the cars are facing) empty? Also, many of the cars look very similar, as though they’re mostly the same make. Surely there’d be a few 1910s and 1920s models at least?
It also looks to me like there is a fence separating the terrace outflow from the car park, and no sign of a gate as far as I can see.
“Surely there’d be a few 1910s and 1920s models at least?” Even more typical of Norwich than Bill’s tractors, at least if my last visit is anything to go by.
I think the chances are that this ISN’T the football ground car park, then, which is disappointing: it would have been one in the eye for the flat-capped brigade. But a distribution centre – if this is what we’ve got – is interesting in its own right.
Is anyone up to identifying the models of the cars?
I wondered if Simon Inglis’s book had more pictures, but I can’t find my copy.
I think the cars are a bit too far away unless there’s a real expert. I mean it looks a bit like an Austin 10, but perhaps it’s a bit bigger – 3 windows rather than 2?
http://www.oldclassiccar.co.uk/30_austin10_3.htm
Are they all facing Mecca? I think we should be told.
Googlemaps would indicate that the cars are facing Basildon.
It is indeed a bit far away, but now I look again, the cars are all very similar.
Was Basildon just a joke, or have I got the image the one way around? I thought the cars are where what is the car park now, ie they’re facing NNW towards Hunstanton?