On Tue, 6 Aug 2019 at 15:16, Philip Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:
[Back alleys] > They have these where I used to visit my grandmother in South Wales, All over the UK, I suspect. If you're old enough to remember the early days (late 60s/ early 70s) of "Coronation Street" the houses on the street had a back alley and most still had outside toilets although many had upgraded to indoor sanitation. > called Gullies locally (excuse spelling, have never seen it written) > I'd not even heard it. And if I had I'd have spelled it completely differently. Because, after some digging, I see they're called gulleys but pronounced "goleys." In fact, that digging shows these things are all over the UK, with different names, although we can only conjecture their original purpose. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/10/the-end-of-the-alley-or-whatever-you-call-it > As you say, people use them to access garages and back in the 70s and 80s > a tipper lorry would come around every few weeks and tip a pile of coal > outside the gates of miners and retired miners. > Ah, I'd forgotten about coal deliveries. Along with an outside toilet there was often a coal house, and you wouldn't want people carrying coal or night soil through your house to/from those. Coal because it might spill. Night soil because of the smell, whether it spilled or not. That made the garages inaccessible for a few hours until the coal was moved. > Garages were an afterthought, though. You'd have moved the coal into the coal house long before morning when your outhouse was emptied. I'm not saying that was the original purpose of all the alleys we map, but if the houses are of a certain age, in a slightly-more gentrified part of a town, that was probably why they were there. -- Paul
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