IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Maya Close, SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, SS3 9FQ

Waterloo Road is in Cambridge Town. Nowadays Cambridge Town merges into the built-up area of Thorpe Bay and the rest of the conurbation of Southend-on-Sea, but looking at old Ordnance Survey maps of the Victorian period the isolation of the settlement and its role in providing accommodation to civilian workers for the military garrison at Shoeburyness is quite evident. Waterloo Road does not appear in the Ordnance Survey map of 1898 although the next street to the south, once Grove Road, but now Chelmer Road, is shown.

Elm Road leads off to the right.

Trafalgar Road is one of a number of late-C19/early-C20 streets in the Cambridge Town district of Shoeburyness built for civilian workers at the former Shoebury Garrison which closed in 1976. West Road can be seen in the background.

Built in 1913, the Palace Cinema was hugely popular with the soldiers of the nearby Shoebury Garrison, but the last film was shown in the 1960s. It then became a camping equipment shop, Shoebury Outdoor Leisure, which itself closed early in 2008. The building and its site are now reputedly owned by a company whose intention is to construct residential flats on the site. However there is local opposition to this, and many, fronted by the jazz trumpeter Digby Fairweather, would like to see the building saved. In the meantime a buddleia grows uncannily in the dead centre of the front façade. On a different geographical note entirely, if you follow the arterial A13 trunk road out of London for its entire length, it ends in the front of the cinema, here on Ness Road. On another Geographical note the Ordnance Survey's 1:10,000 scale mapping shows that the 185000 metre northern gridline runs through the centre of the front façade of the building and exits through the middle of the right hand side.