Leatherhead

Many of Leatherhead's modern residents will have no idea how the town looked before Leret Way and the Swan Shopping Centre were built in 1980, and photographs taken twenty-five years ago will be as surprising to them as images of the town as it looked at the turn of the century. Such is the pace of change at the close of the twentieth century. For those whose acquaintance with the town goes back somewhat further photographs of a town which has all but vanished will evoke memories of a time when the upheavals which characterised our own age were still unknown.

The photographs in this fascinating selection bring old Leatherhead to life. Drawn in very large part from the considerable collection of the Leatherhead and District Local History Society as well as from private individuals, they recall the Swan Hotel and the King's Head in the High Street, the Congregational Church (later the Co-op Society), and the old Clock Tower in North Street, once the home of the town's horse-drawn fire engine! In the days before catalogue and video rental stores shopkeepers provided a level of service we can only dream of today, and entertainment was community based - at the Repertory Theatre in the former Victoria Hall, or the Crescent Cinema in Church Street.

The glimpses of old Leatherhead these photographs provide (many previously unpublished) will fill many with nostalgia and will fascinate all those who know the town as it looks now or as it was. In addition they inspire a final thought-provoking question: just how will pictures of modern Leatherhead look to people in another fifty years time?