Bickerton Advert

[superteacher]

in the advert, there is footage o a station. It looks like Greenford. Does anyone agree?

[davidb]

I feel sure that the scene with the BR DMU is at Ealing Broadway so maybe the 1962 Stock is there too?

[quex]

I don't profess to be an expert on these things, but the print shop about 18 seconds in has a 991 phone no. area code, which I think is also Ealing/Perivale.

Perhaps not a co-incidence that Ealing Studios is just down the road...?

--

Edit: In fact, I reckon the print shop is No. 47, The Broadway (now a Sun newsagents) - which would place it right next to the old District Railway station building. The bus stop's moved a few yards south!

[castlebar]

991 was none of Ealing, Alperton nor Perivale

[quex]

Managed to find a photo on Flickr that does indeed show the print shop in the old District station.

www.flickr.com/photos/southallroutemaster/49964385936/

You don't often see people queuing for the bus like that these days!

[Chris M]

May 21, 2021 10:54:23 GMT castlebar said:

991 was none of Ealing, Alperton nor Perivale

www.ukphoneinfo.com/old-std-list claims 991 was "Perivale, Alperton and North Ealing", although the list is explicitly noted as containing errors

[Tom]

I've found at least three examples in five minutes of Googling of 0181-991-XXXX numbers being allocated in the Perivale area, and a further one in Wembley. All of which support the Alperton/Perivale suggestion.

[class411]

[London]

The '991' code clearly dates from the period after exchanges were known (and dialled) by name.

When I was a child, our number was Perivale nnnn, so you would dial 737 nnnn.

In that era, no exchange would have a '1' in its code, because there was no letter associated with '1'.

As they ran out of numbers, the system changed and your number became: nnn nnnn, then in stages to 020 nnnn nnnn.

[norbitonflyer]

Each London excahnge originally had a three letter code which translated to three digits. For obvious reasons not all permutations of three letters were possible, for example CATford, BATtersea and ACTon would all have coded as 228, so various contrivances were performed to give each exchange a unique code, for example Acton was 220 (ACtOn, later renamed ACOrn, ostensibly after Acorn Gardens, (it changed to 992 after letter mnemonics were discontinued). Some were very contrived - for example because 926 was WANstead, Wandsworth was 826, which was christened VANdyke.

Many exchanges had more than one code, as they served more than 10,000 subscriber lines. For example Kingston's original 546 code was later augmented by 547,549 and 541, and many businesses in Kingston also use 339 ("EDWard", possibly after local boy Muybridge, the photographic pioneer).
rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php?dno

Nowadays, any spare eight-digit London number can be allocated to any phone line in the 020 area.

In some cases names were changed because of local snobbery - for example some who considered themselves to live in Chelsea are supposed to have objected to having a FULham phone number, so the exchange was renamed DUKe (both of course code as 485). We see the same thing today with postcodes.

[quex]

Bringing things a bit closer to topic, there's another version of the ad which has been cropped just a little bit less.

This allows us to see that there appear to be two signal heads at the end of the platform in the tube train shot - which would neatly align with the suggestion from davidb that it is at Ealing Broadway, Central line platforms.

With the logistics of filming, a terminus would be a good place to shoot, because of the extra layover time as compared to a station stop.

Greenford's quite high up on a viaduct which doesn't seem to fit with what little background we can see in the tube train shot in the advert.