Cookit Gallery

Laindon in 1928. In the photograph, Churchill and Johnson, the building supplies store, lies between Northumberland Avenue and Station Approach. The pole on the left of the road with the horizontal rods was called a telegraph pole, though by this time it would have been carrying telephone lines. Telegraph was a system of sending messages along electric cables using electrical pulses called morse code; telegraph poles used to be placed alongside railway lines.

Can you stand where the photographer stood in 1928?
What differences do you notice about this view and the present? What similarities are there?

There wasn’t a station at Basildon until 1970. Why did the town corporation not want a station connecting Basildon directly with London?