IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Gainsborough Avenue, CANVEY ISLAND, SS8 7LU

Pub in the High Street.

This huge estate public house has been a fixture on Canvey Island since the 1930s, and was for many years the only hotel on the island. Indeed the 1956 Ordnance Survey map actually describes it as such. This was the local and regular haunt of the utterly underrated Dr Feelgood band, and the cover photo of their 5th album, Be Seeing You, released in 1977, featuring Lee and the rest of the group, (but not Wilko Johnson who had just very recently left the group), was taken in the public bar. R.I.P. Lee Brilleaux (1952-1994)

Crescent Road

Away from the central shopping area the High Street is lined with housing. Here by the junction with Hope Road a First bus collects a passenger from the Lappmark Road bus stop.

This is the intriguingly named Gafzelle Drive viewed from the top of the sea defence wall. The Canvey Community Archive website http://canveyisland.org/page_id__1140_path__0p2p30p.aspx has several images of Gafzelle Drive taken during a freshwater flood event in 1968, some 15 years after the catastrophic seawater flood and inundation of Canvey Island in 1953.

The building on the left is the former Canvey & District (latterly Eastern National) bus depot which now houses the Castle Point Transport Museum on whose annual Open Day this picture was taken. The bus is a former London Transport Daimler CWA6 built 1944 and acquired by Southend Corporation in 1953 for trolleybus replacement. Its Massey body is newer than its chassis having been fitted just before the bus went into service at Southend.

The photographer does not know the formal name of this dyke but it does run along the eastern side of Kismet Park and excess water is pumped out into the Thames estuary by the St Anne's Pumping Station which is behind him. Although the dyke runs in a concrete conduit, old maps show that historically, and certainly before there was any residential development, there has always been a drain along this route.

This is a preserved former Arriva Dennis Dart with Plaxton Pointer bodywork in a late version of the livery of Maidstone & District, a company whose operations were eventually absorbed into the Arriva empire in 1998. Over 7000 Dart-Pointers were produced in various forms during the last decade of the C20 and the first of the C21 making the type one of the most prolific models ever to have been manufactured. The building on the right is the former Canvey & District (latterly Eastern National) bus depot which now houses the Castle Point Transport Museum on whose annual Open Day this picture was taken.

A fine sunny morning but there are no takers at this Adidas sponsored outdoor gym in Kismet Park.