1950s Hereford or Life before the Ring Road.

Bert Daniels a former post office Engineer, interviewed in the 1980’s, reminisces about the old burial ground before the ring road. Bert went to St Owens boy school and lived in Daws Road.

​“St Owens’s off Bath Street. Bath Street wasn’t much different to now except in the entrance. That road wasn’t there - off the square opposite me, it wasn’t there, they built that recently. Well recently – the last twenty years. Bath Street went the other side of the two pubs and that was Ogleby’s, and the Barbers. That was all their garden there, you see, all that. They took the gardens off them. Mind they must of paid them well, I suppose, and that was a burial ground the rest of it, where the trees are now. Oh, it was twice, three times as big, it was then, an old burial ground closed up. Used more for the kids to play in than anything else, you know, with rails all the way round, like.
Our Daws Road, it was never a through road, you could get out of there, but not like it is now you see. So really being a posh place, it went down to what it is now like, you know.

​Bath Street use to come between the Lamb and – what’s the name of the pub?  oh, I don’t know, I’ve forgotten (The Sun) Both pubs are still there, except the one’s called The Barrels. That used to go straight through to pick up Bath Street just round the corner, and there was a little road that came across that connected Daws Road, because it wasn’t a big road then. There was only a little – well, from here to the wall, more of a lane than anything else that connected us up to the roadways like.”

​Bert was then asked about the public baths on Bath Street
“Yes – oh no. In Kyrle Street. Where the big building is now, where they sell carpets and different things there, well that was a flour mill, and it was the people from there that created the baths, which was round the corner on the left hand side, and that was the baths. Baths for years where I learnt to swim, anyway till in the end they built these new baths, and they shut that, and they made the baths into the Masonic Hall.
They used to be there every week like, well they used to let it out for dances and all the rest of it. Posh dances, The Masonic Hall like, see”

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Photos of the excavation of St Owens Church graveyard and construction of Bath Street ring road. 
Photographs courtesy of Chris Ogleby and Derek Foxton

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