This is not the most exciting photograph that will be posted here but it shows the beginning of the major construction required to amalgamate St Mary’s with St Joseph’s Convent in Abbey Wood. The work commenced in May 1977 and was estimated to take 20 months.
It was agreed that before work started on the main extension, a new playground and car park to the north of the school should be constructed. This was because the original playground to the left of the main building as you looked at it would, with the adjacent playing field, be where the main extension was built.
No one can deny that the building work was hugely disruptive and, for those of us at St Mary’s in the late 1970s, we literally shared the school with a building site. Those of us who arrived in September 1977 simply assumed the playground had always been where we found it and, on arrival at school in the morning, we’d walk up the path, turn right before the entrance hall, go past the gym and round the back of it and then go up the slightly bending ramp on to the playground. There would be about ten different games of football happening at once. I do recall being very impressed with the size of the playground which made the one I’d left behind at Our Lady of the Rosary in Blackfen seem very childish and small.
By the way, you can just see the old first year huts (built in 1966) on the left hand side.
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