Of Roller-rinks & Bowling Alleys

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Warley Odeon, soon to be Bowl...



Here's a thing. I sat down last night to write about Arthur Brown and the context in which I remember the single 'Fire'. I got diverted by the exam-grades farrago, so used that as the base from which to write. What I had intended was to relate my one and only experience of the roller rink at Spring Hill: 'Whispering Wheels'. I had thought it might have been earlier, but it must have been 1968. The only reason I can be certain of this is that I remember 'Fire' being played on the PA as we skated (gamely in my case, as I realised very early on that I'd never learned to turn corners on skates) and as the single didn't arrive in the charts 'til '68, I guess that was the year, as by the following summer I was doing entirely different stuff.

Asking Jane about the name of the place, which was an ice-rink before that, got us into remembering the Warley Bowl - the former Warley Cinema: The Odeon. My experience of the bowl was as an eight or nine-year-old. My Mom played for a team and during the school holidays, I used to go with her to the alley to watch her play - I think my sister went to my nan's as she was only six or seven.

I can still smell the new carpet and polished wood and see the glitter-lights that were everywhere - and the lanes! Thirty-two bowling lanes. They seemed to stretch away as far as my young eyes could see. The sounds are still with me. The whole experience was just plain exotic for a little boy from Winson Street, a slice of America in Quinton, the stuff of those imported comics we all so avidly consumed at the time.

As with all fads, the Warley Bowl lasted only a few, short years, until 1970. Closed and fenced off, my last memories of the place were of certain Quinton lads at school, having broken into the site soon after it closed and bringing Top Rank patches and bowling shoes into school to sell. I seem to recall Honest Les and Lenny being involved, but I could be wrong as it is half a century ago. I think I had one of those patches sewn onto the backside of my Levis until the things rotted away in the mid-seventies. There you go.

  

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