Northgates - Leicester

Artist's Notes by David Weston:

It would be no use to walk along Northgates today looking for the scene as I have painted it, for nowhere has there been greater change.  All the buildings have been demolished, as has the huge girder bridge that carried the lines of the [Great Central] Railway from Marylebone to Sheffield and Manchester.

[If you were to stand in the same spot today that I stood to sketch the scene many years ago, you would see*] just how much it has altered.  The bustling activity of Northgates with its shops and complexity of small businesses, its bright red buses setting off on their journeys to the country and the rattle of the tramcars gave this busy thoroughfare an atmosphere that bristled with life and interest.

One�s thoughts are bound to go back to those years when a journey on a bus or tram held a certain excitement, and the conductor issued his brightly coloured tickets from a clip-board which he then "punched" in his bell-punch with that familiar "Ting" that has long since gone from our way of life.

*Note: The Artist originally referred to a photograph of the area taken some years after the painting; however, although the photo showed the area totally transformed (for the worse) that image is by now unfortunately totally out of date.

In this picture of a bustling Northgates scene, the writing on the tram is says "BOVRIL," and that on the front of the double-decker bus, "Anstey."  A little of the clarity of all of the images has been lost during scanning and subsequent publishing to the various web pages. 

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