Teenage Wildlife on Eldon Street

Eldon Street is the heart of the Teenage Wildlife project and the starting point for people to share their memories and experiences growing up in and around Barnsley. Spanning the 1950s to present day, a variety of part time jobs and pastimes brought teens to Eldon Street, with popular shops and businesses peppering the way. From the bus station area to Peel Square at the other end, iconic sights such as the Benjamin Harral’s clock and The Civic provided landmarks along the route.

Key hangouts for teenagers on Eldon Street included the cinema (formerly Empire and The Gaumont, then The Odeon, and now Parkway), the YMCA, and McDonalds. The Civic Hall was a very popular spot bringing up reminiscences of performing and watching theatre production, attending concerts, discos and gigs in the main auditorium and Centenary Rooms.

Some of the people we spoke to had worked on and around Eldon Street as teenagers for one of the popular shops or businesses. Many remembered haircuts at one of the local salons, getting their ears pierced or buying clothes. For some it was and still is a route to take you from A to B through the town centre. For others, it was a home away from home.

Here’s a snapshot selection of memories that were shared with the Teenage Wildlife project, please check out our virtual tours of Eldon Street, which include an interactive map showcasing the youth culture hot-spots, or deep dive into some of those memories with our downloadable project magazine.

Janet – 50s teen

“I remember The Civic and picture place, and all the shops. There used to be Devonshire pub at end, and then The Three Cranes where we used to go dancing. Of course, Woolworths were through onto Eldon Street and Benjamin Harrals. Nice shops really.”

David – 50s teen

“I had a lot of friends around the village, I used to go to Barnsley Feast with them, Robinson’s Feast in Barnsley, it was a regular thing down near bus station area. Veronica came to me one day, she says ‘I’ve put you on a blind date, you’ve to meet her in Barnsley bus station at Threepenny Bit”. I met her, this day like, and we got on very well right from the start. We went to the pictures, just walked to Gaumont, it was Gaumont then and we went to see Blue Jeans, a teenage type film. We just started meeting each other. She used to come to our house and then I used to go up to theirs. Pictures, Gaumont, you know just walking round. We’d not much money to go anywhere, it were just a matter of courting.”

Maureen – 50s teen

“At 14 I was a Saturday girl for Mr Leslie Frances, and so learning to shampoo. I wanted to earn something, I’ve always wanted to have a scooter. When I did leave school at 15 – and by then the salon was in Eldon Arcade – he took me on straightaway. I did try to get my City & Guilds in Leeds but a couple of times coming back wasn’t very nice on my scooter, so I trained there at the salon. We had training days as well where you would watch but to begin with all you did was shampoo, it was up to you how quickly you got on. When you got the job there first, you would line up and he would walk down and he would say, “So-and-so you have that colour”. When it came to me, I had a lot of freckles and he said, “You can have your hair coloured red”. My mum got a shock when I went home with it!”

Stuart – 60s teen

“There used to be a newsagents, Lodges they called it, and every Friday I’d come straight down to towards bus station, call into Lodges and get New Musical Express for sixpence. There were lots of articles in for the different artists but I got it mainly for the charts. Then the Picture House, my grandma used to take me to the Empire as it was then and it burnt down and then it became the Gaumont. Mr. Moore was manager and he asked us to play on a Saturday morning for kids before films started playing, which we did. Played there a few times I think and then there was a competition you had to guess who these Beatles were, it just showed the tops of their heads, they asked us to go and do the draw for the winner which we did and for that we got some free tickets to you know to go and watch the film, Beatles’ Hard Days Night.”

David - 60s teen

“I did, at the age of 13 to 15, work on Barnsley market on a Saturday morning, and that was when May Day Green was part of the setup. But the only major connection was the cinema which was a regular place to visit, but it was more of a treat because we had a local cinema at Elsecar that was much cheaper than coming into town. If you came to the cinema in town you made an event of it. But yeah, I was quite familiar with Eldon Street and particularly the Yorkshire Bank where I wanted to work. It was full of businesses that I didn’t really know anything about. I was aware of the YMCA, even though it occupied the first and second floors of its building on Eldon Street. But it was just a place that you walked along to get from A to B, I suppose.”

Susan - 60s/70s teen

“The Barnsley bus station had a newspaper kiosk called the Threepenny Bit, that was a very popular congregating place for boys and girls in their teens in in this era. There was the Aloha coffee bar and the Wimpy bar. The coffee bars were the McDonald’s of their day, a huge meeting place for kids and teenagers to go. They’d have their Lambretta scooters parked up outside and it was like the American Dream. There was the cinema down the bottom end. So you could have your cinema, you could have coffees, you could just hang out. Somehow I landed this Saturday job at Barnsley Library, which was at the Civic Hall on Eldon Street. I think I started there when I was about 15. I got paid one pound a day for this Saturday job, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Linda - 60s/70s teen

“I went round town, I just went in all the shops in town and just went and said, ‘Do you want any Saturday girls?’ And I just went round and round and round and some people said, ‘Oh I’ll take your name’ and they took my name and I just went back and I think somebody must have talked to me or – they don’t just set people on don’t they? I remember The Civic Hall, I remember there was something went off on a Monday and a Wednesday, like a dance or disco or a something or other, you used to dance downstairs and then sit upstairs in the circle and snog, that was basically what it were all about. I remember my dad taking me to see wrestling because I loved that when I were little and growing up. And we went to pantomime every year, saw various pantomimes at Civic. Albert Hirst were on this street, weren’t it? I can remember queuing in there and smelling sawdust and seeing things hanging upside down and not really understanding I suppose what meat were all about at that point, but I remember seeing it, must’ve been hares and rabbits hanging up.”

Christine, b. 1952 - 60s/70s teen

“I was a Saturday cashier at Wilsons dress shop, in 1970-71, which was where the library is now, and one of the windows overlooked the fish market. I often sat there at the end of the day logging all the garments sold. All the staff were called Miss or Mrs, never first names. We had to wear black dresses in the winter and navy blue in the summer. There were three girls who were called window dressers and whose main job was to ensure all the models in the windows were dressed nicely. Purchases were packed at a packing table into a proper paper carrier bag. That was where I learned to fold garments properly when I wasn’t needed as a cashier.”

Catherine – 70s teen

“When I first started working at Leslie Frances, there was still the market where they ended up moving it. Everybody decried the loss of the old Barnsley market because it were well known everywhere. People used to come from other towns to Barnsley market. It had a good name for itself. And they built that Metropolitan Centre across the road, and everybody said what a carbuncle it was, an eyesore, and that’s since gone hasn’t it? Thank God! But it had a good atmosphere, the market, and we used to go there at lunchtime, do a bit of shopping, bit of fashion shopping, there were other shops, Top Shop – I can’t remember the names now but we used to be browsing in them in us lunch hour and then it’d be back to work. It had a good atmosphere and it used to make me laugh, women doing the shopping with their curlers in and then head scarf on, ready to go out at night! I used to think, why would you walk around with your curlers in? But that’s just what they did.”

Kath – 70s teen

“I’d just left school in September, well July, but my parents said: ‘Oh,’ – because they were really kind to me – ‘have off till September. Just enjoy your holidays’. I knew they’d support me whatever I wanted to do, and I just came up Eldon Street and I saw a sign in Lodges window saying, ‘Shop assistant wanted’, and just walked in and got the job, basically. I remember a place called ‘Kathleen’s’. I only remember it because it were my name, a flower shop that used to exist up there. Woolworths, that was such a place. There used to be Wilson’s dress shop at the side of that, it just used to be a buzzing place.”

Eleanor – 80s teen

“I used to spend a lot of time on Eldon Street because there used to always be the fair two or three times a year, in Courthouse car park. When we did panto, we were always told we couldn’t go to the fair, and we went to fair and once we got carried away with time and missed the show so we got into bother for that. We used to go round corner to what were called Hagenbachs, which were just next to Frank Birds, which were like a pasty shop. We used to go and get us dinner there sometimes and things like that. There was a Wimpy, if you went out at back of the theatre and up the back alleyway.”

Mark – 80s teen

“Eldon Street and The Civic felt not the most prosperous part of Barnsley at that point. The train station was still the old train station. It felt a bit like a forgotten part of the town in a way. These kind of rundown of areas. There was that shop Pollyanna’s. It’s a little bit like Paul Smith’s shop in Nottingham. It felt like this isolated kind of style guru that was sat there. I remember Singer Sewing Machines centre being pretty much next to The Civic and we would go in, park up, you would certainly go into The Civic that way. And there would be a pop-up comedy club in The Courthouse pub.”

Tony – 80s teen

“We always used to meet in the bus station when we were going into town, all used to congregate outside the bus station and then walk on Eldon Street, going up to the Portcullis or up to The Boys Club. Very familiar territory. I think first gig I ever went to was at The Civic. It wasn’t until I was 15, the first proper gig that I went to on my own, with mates. I can remember the queue outside on Eldon Street, we were just getting into it, so we weren’t as smart as some of the other people there from Barnsley, but looking at the fashions, and then the doors open and everybody went upstairs; some great music playing, I can’t remember who the DJ was but some good tunes and then the first band came on and we were just blown away because this is what we’ve been listening to for months and then The Chords came on, a national not local band. Brilliant, just a great feeling. I’ve still got me ticket as well from that.”

Taryn – 90s teen

“We did perform with PADS at The Civic a couple of times, but my main memory of performing at The Civic was with school when it were a proper theatre. It was just unbelievable to walk in and it be a real stage, and there be tiered seating and after being in the school hall performing on these stages, it just felt really special. Mentioning the Odeon, yeah! I remember going to watch ‘My Girl’ at and it being the first film that really made me cry and I can remember just walking down and thinking I can’t step out onto the street with tears in my eyes! It were awful! I do remember Army Stores, I had the standard army bag that everybody had in their teens, of course I had a parka and all that sort of stuff. And music as well, shopping in Casa Disco, going in there and it just being like a proper little treasure trove.”

Jason – 90s teen

“I think for me, other than a couple of individual shops or businesses, it was very much a thoroughfare. When I were at school I did go into town every Saturday, or Sunday, and that was to go to the cinema, we’d literally see any film that was on. So we saw a lot of rubbish films. One of the shops on Eldon Street that I used to go into was Famous Army Stores which may have been next to Halfords which sold bicycles and like car related stuff. Just off Eldon Street, we just used to refer to it as the ‘Bus station cafe’ I used to go there many mornings and have a cup of tea. I was one of these art students that always carried a notebook around and would like write stuff and draw in it and things like that. During us teen years, you had McDonald’s and then opposite you had what we called ‘The Circle’, which looked like it was this big circle stone plinth in the middle of Peel Square that was never finished. That was always a meeting place for students, teens, druggies. We’d just be like ‘Oh yeah, meet you at the circle at one’.”