Zion Yard

January 1965. This view shows one of the many old yards that lined Queen Street.The building on the right is the Sunday School building for the Zion Chapel. The chapel itself is the length of a graveyard further up the road. Norman Tempest used the shop straight opposite in the Exchange Buildings to sell furniture before he built a new store in Little Lane near the library and then in 1968 a much bigger store called DFS joined on to Ashville House by the Post Office. In the inter-war period a cafe, the Exchange Cafe, above this furniture centre was run by a Mrs. Powney; the shop underneath at that time was Melias. During the Depression, before the Labour Exchange on Station Road was built, people used to queue up on the pavement on the right of the picture in order to collect the dole. But the dole couldn't be had unless the unemployed did some work for it. The first scheme for this was to fill in all the quarries and remove the spoil heaps from the land behind Scatcherd Park. All the streets and yards that used to take off at right angles to Queen Street in this area of town (except for Wesley Street) have now disappeared and a new road in the opposite direction, Merlyn Rees Way, has been built. The former Zion caretaker's house now stands on this rather than in Zion Yard.

Notes from Leodis web-site