St Austell Fore Street Rivera Restaurant

A Memory of St Austell.

The Rivera!! Once a week after school in 1964- 65, a group of us (mostly 6th-formers from the Grammar School, which was co-ed by that time) used to gather upstairs in the Rivera Restaurant (on the right in the photo) and order tea and buttered teacakes - all we could afford - and we'd make them last an hour or more. I'm sure we were often noisy, and took up a lot of room, much to the consternation of other customers and the staff, but we were regulars too, just learning how to be adults. I remember most of the old shops along Fore Street - WH Smith on the corner opposite the church where I was confirmed, the Home and Colonial store, which had boxes of biscuits with glass lids, just at the right height to tempt young children, Northcott's the butcher across the street from H&C (Stuart Northcott was in my class at school), and Sydney Grose, where we purchased our school uniforms. Saturday mornings were spent at the Odeon to watch the cartoons, westerns and Pathe News, all for the sum of sixpence - ninepence if you went up to the balcony. I attended the Infants at West Hill School where my father taught music, then Mount Charles. I lived on Bodmin Road for many years, so I walked along Fore Street to and from school each day, trudging up the steep hill to the green bridge over the railway lines, and on up Trevarthian Road.  The family moved to Grampound Road for my last 2 years of grammar school. Never came back to live after college, and after 38 years in Montreal, Canada and South Africa, I now live in Nova Scotia, Canada, in a small lobster-fishing village. I still bake teacakes from time to time... just for the memories.