Then & now, old photos

For the last 4 years we have been searching for old photos of the house but nearly all the old photos that we find of this part of the village are taken from down the main road, so all we see is our chimneys behind the house next door (the one we are currently renting).

Circa 1905 from Our Warwickshire. Our house is behind this one, the middle chimneys are ours. You can just see our front garden (there is a woman standing in our gate) and see through to our back garden as the neighbours extension (where I am currently sitting writing this) wasn’t attached to the house. There is a building there but it looks like an animal shed.

Circa 1910.

Circa 1930. Our front garden looks very overgrown but you can see the pear tree here. This pear tree was cut down sometime in the last 50 years, not sure when but we do know where it was as the stump remains under the lawn.

Photo from 2017, soon after we moved in when the 3 huge Leylandii trees were still in our front and back gardens. Removing these was the very first thing we did making the house (and our neighbours gardens) so much lighter. The telegraph pole is still in the same place and a modern glass phone box had replaced the lovely old one but this was removed recently.

Another photo from the same position (our pear tree is in blossom) with a Shell garage across the road! I love the old Shell sign! Photo is circa 1930, but can anyone date the car or car reg?

This is a copy of a very old photo that has recently been given to someone in the village and is of the front of our house! There is no telegraph pole so it must be pre 1930, there was another photo that came with this one of a similar style with the date 1922.

The same view today.

Close up of above photo. Our pear tree is clear, there is a garden fence instead of a wall and both first floor windows on the lower side of the house have wooden shutters. When we renovated the windows a few months ago we found a couple of big iron hooks fitted on the outer window frames which we thought looked like hinges for shutters. One hook is still there.

This is the old photo that came with this one above and has a hand written sign of ‘Radway council school, July 1922’. 99 years old!

Another photo that has recently come to light showing part of the front of our house, this time the telegraph pole is there so this is circa 1930.

The same view today.

Close up of above photo. There is a ‘Lyons Tea’ metal sign on the front of our house and a front door where the garage doors are now! We have never seen this before, we assumed there was never a door here, in fact I thought this would have been a barn/somewhere they kept animals but it looks like another tiny cottage in itself.

This is prior to the renovations that were done in the 1930’s/40’s. We are not sure on the exact date but judging by the newspapers we found and the style of the renovations we are pretty sure they were around this time. Our deeds also detail the house increasing massively in value around this time so it adds up.

This is the only old photo we had previously seen of the front of the house and we think is circa 1950/60 and after the house was renovated. It has barely changed from this photo, apart from the pear tree which has long gone.

Close up of above photo. The garden now has the stone wall and the fancy stone gate posts have been built. The house has been pointed and the roof (badly) fixed up with cement. The windows and garage doors are all the same but the (middle) front door and lintel look like they might be the original ones. Sadly they had been replaced before we moved in.