IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Odhams Trading Estate, St. Albans Road, WATFORD, WD24 7RT

This postbox is one of an increasingly common modern design, intended for internal positions such as post offices, airports and, as here, supermarkets. It stands in a corner of the porch of a large ASDA supermarket and receives its final collections at 6:30pm on weekdays and at 11:30am on Saturdays.

ASDA was created in 1965 by the merger of Asquith supermarkets and Associated Dairies where the acronym was taken from the first two letters of Asquith and the first two letters of Dairies. It was purchased by the American company Wal-Mart in 1999. This is the store in North Watford.

This giant store is open 24 hours a day. Local road signage refers to it as a hypermarket.

A distinctive landmark on the main A41 which runs just to our left, this large building - ugly or attractive depending on your point of view - was erected in 1954 for the printing company Odham's. Its large clock tower incorporates a water tank for use in the printing process. Odham's ceased trading at the start of 1969 when its last title, the comic Smash!, was transferred to another publisher.

The structure is a reminder of Watford's history as a centre of the printing industry. It was built in 1954 to the designs of the architectural practice of Yates, Cook & Derbyshire and forms a prominent landmark along the A41 North Western Avenue. The massive clock tower has a purpose - it houses a tank for holding water during the printing process. The building is listed. (Note from a purely cartographic point of view the co-ordinates given for this photo illustrate the distortion caused in the Ordnance Survey's 1:50,000 mapping by the over-emphasis on the importance of roads, and their greatly exaggerated width. The co-ordinates are taken from the much more accurate 1:10,000 scale maps.)