Living in Brownsover
Anne and I lived for a short while in the early 1980s at Brownsover, a suburb of Rugby in Warwickshire.
We had been living at Halstead, the delightful Essex market town where I had been the Manager of the Halstead Empire Theatre.
But I went to work at Rugby, as Manager of Rugby Enterprise Trust, a non-profit-making organisation designed to help Rugby’s unemployed back to work.
Brownsover is an extensive modern estate to the North of Rugby, beside the Oxford Canal and the main road leading North to Leicester and the M1 and M6 motorways.
On the part of the estate where we lived, all the streets are named after places in the Lake District. We lived in Borrowdale.
While we were living there, I became involved with the Brownsover Community Association, which operated a community centre.
On days off, we sometimes visited other towns, particularly Coventry and Leicester, while it was also quite easy, once we had got to Leicester, to visit Anne’s mother at Barrow-upon-Soar.
It was also rather nice to explore the local footpaths, including the line of the old Great Central Railway.
We later went to live at Purbrook in Hampshire, after I was appointed Manager of the Empire Cinema at Havant.
I now lead occasional Guided Walks around Rugby.
If anybody reading this has any connections with Brownsover, or the Rugby area in general (Born? Lived? Worked? Ancestors? Relatives?), I would be very pleased to hear from them.
Posted by colin on Wednesday 17th May, 2006 at 6:36am