I've been meaning to ask ...what sort of "village" is this one of yours that used to have multiple banks? I live in a true village, surrounded by countless similar other ones, but not a single one of these villages has ever (well, certainly not in the ~35 years I've been here) had even one bank
Kind Regards, John
I have lived all my life so far in urban areas. We have always known the main shopping centres of these areas as "the village", even when I lived in Golders Green. Wikipedia talks about a village being bigger than a hamlet and smaller than a town. It also says an area earns the right to call itself a village when a church is built. I'm not sure what the difference is between these urban villages and your "true village", unless by true you mean it has rural areas surrounding it, separating it from the next built up area. If this is the case, what I know as urban villages would have been like yours many years ago, but have since grown out to meet its neighbours.
The town where I live is Stockport, but this is made up of many villages that over the years have spread into each other. I currently live in Bramhall (and have done since mid-1999) and when we first moved in, there were 6 banks in the village: RBS, NatWest, Britannia (later Co-op bank), Alliance & Leicester (later Santander), Barclays and HSBC. Bramhall village centre was once based around the large junction (now a roundabout) adjacent to Bramall Hall on the A5102. But since the appearance of the railway in 1845, the village centre has migrated to the areas around the junction between the A5102, the A5149 and the B5094.
There were a great many farms in Bramhall, up to the 1960s. We live on an estate built on one. The last piece of open land to be built on in the village was a small field that housed a few sheep bang in the centre of the village that had a house built on it in the 2000s. You can see the style has been matched to the neighbouring houses.
This picture from 10 February 1934 shows how rural Bramhall used to be. The camera is looking from the direction of Woodford towards the current village centre.
Below is a sat view during the construction of the A555 airport road, started in 1995 and finished in the last few years. The boomerang shaped road bottom left in the picture above is Jenny Lane, which you will see on the image below in the bottom centre. Unfortunately, I could not rotate the sat image to give a similar orientation as my compass has disappeared. But it gives you an idea just how much those fields have been developed over the decades.
Credit for images to Wikipedia, Google Maps and Stockport Image Archive.