This picture is from the Andover Borough Guide of 1937, and shows Western Road looking down towards Bridge Street, photographed by Edith Howard.

The overall look may not have changed today but there are a number of points of interest.

On the right are the flint boundary walls of Kambia, then a relatively new house and built for the proprietor of the Andover Advertiser, Alfred J Holmes and his wife Temperance.

Alfred had taken over the newspaper from his father James Charles Holmes in 1908 and was the second Holmes generation to run the paper.

The family had arrived from Hull in 1876 where Holmes senior was a bookseller and stationer.

Reputedly, he wanted to acquire a newspaper and the choice was between the Andover Advertiser and the Falmouth Packet.

Coming back to 1937, the reason for the name of the house - Kambia - still retained today, is a sad one; it was where the couple’s elder son Harold was killed in Sierra Leone, the victim of an ambush, as part of an uprising in 1931 (the full story by Craig Fisher can be read in Lookback at Andover, 2017).

Further down can be seen the upper half of the house which was called Grafton in the 1930s but was previously Elm Cottage.

Percy Trodd in his book about Anna Valley Motors strays delightfully into many details of the immediate area and tells us that the occupant Mrs Aubrey renamed the house after the village where she had once lived.

The family owned Aubrey’s Temperance Hotel - which coincidentally was situated above Holmes’ shop at 10 High Street - and also the adjoining Aubrey’s restaurant.

Grafton itself was requisitioned by the Ministry of Food during World War II, to become the Food Control and National Registration Office, continuing as such until the end of rationing in the early 1950s.

It is now the site of six flats, built in the 1970s.

On the left of the picture, a sign advertises that the building behind the garden walls is the Andover and District Conservative Club.

This was Wykeham House and possibly the Conservatives had only recently moved in.

In earlier days, it had been the Wykeham House High School for Girls, presided over by the two Miss Reynolds, ‘assisted by experienced English and Foreign Governesses’.

Far into the distance, at the beginning of Bridge Street, can be seen the premises of Anna Valley Motors and here Mr Trodd is certainly the source to consult.

Its Anna Valley beginnings, founded by Alfred Head, included the testing of an experimental company-designed aeroplane on Bury Hill between 1912 and 1914. It succeeded in flying ‘a few yards’.

The move to Bridge Street was in 1924 and during the Thirties, the increasing prosperity of the firm under the new directorship of Walter Lansley and Harold Hill allowed a branch in Salisbury to be set up. Much later, in 1952, another was opened in Amesbury.

However, the outbreak of war in 1939 curtailed operations when many of the staff joined up, while restrictions dictated that new cars could only be sold to essential users.

The post-war period was marked by increasing competition but in the 1950s the company gathered pace again and, under yet another directorship, opened new premises in Weyhill Road, called the Motordrome.

However, the business seems to have reached a natural end when it finally closed in 1962.