Your correspondence regarding the row of shops that used to be part of the Forster Square development continues to come in.

We’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for all your memories on this topic, and to now decide that the time has come to draw a line under it for the time being.

Before we do, though, over to Christopher Ingleby, of Great Horton: “In June 1964, I recall one of the shops (it would be the one nearest to Canal Road I think) being a milk/coffee bar or snack bar. I know this because I had been across at Kellett, Woodman’s offices at the bottom of Bolton Road where I had attended my second interview for a trainee position in their pattern room. I was aged 15 and ready to leave Great Horton Secondary School and start work.

“Older readers may remember Kellett, Woodman’s building – it had a lift tower at the front which rose two storeys above the actual building itself. The top two floors had been lost in a fire when Cawthra’s had the building and Kellett, Woodman were still at Union Street (pre-1957).

“Continuing with my recollections, I went into this cafe as I had been told not to bother going back to school in the afternoon as it would be too late.

“I’m talking much later than your recent reader who remembers Lincoln Florists and a typewriter store in 1957. Work on demolishing Foster Square was well advanced by 1964 and these shops would, by the time in question, be ‘stood alone’ awaiting the attention of the demolition hammer.

“Broadway was a really smart shopping area when Forster Square was finished. British Home Stores, C&A, Boots and WH Smith’s had big stores on there, and at the corner of Broadway and Cheapside there was J F Stones Radio and TV.

“The ABC Ritz Cinema was at the end nearest to Bank Street (where Yorkshire Bank is now).”

L Shaw, of Idle, adds: “The shop mentioned in Forster Square was a sweet shop. I delivered goods there myself.

“However, in 1942 I left school and worked at Commercial Cables which stood on that site. Next door was a rival firm, Western Union.

“One day coming out of work I saw Winston Churchill coming out of the station (complete with big cigar) in an open-top car. His movements were kept secret owing to security reasons.”

And finally, to W Marsden, of Bradford, who has more on a subsidiary point about a large whale being exhibited around Forster Square in the 1950s – apparently it wasn’t the first.

“Further to the Remember When? memory of a large whale being exhibited about the year 1957 on spare ground in Forster Square, I also remember a whale on display in Bradford City Centre in 1934.

“As 14-year-old pupils at Hanson Girls High School, we were taken to view this largest of marine animals displayed on a piece of spare land on Thornton Road next to the New Victoria Cinema.

“To get there it was Shanks’s pony in the rain from school in Barkerend Road to the site.

“When we got inside we walked in single file around this huge mammal (which dwarfed us, all the while gazing up at it in wonderment at its size), but at the same time holding our noses because the smell was awful. Nowadays a smelly exhibit would not be allowed.

“The smell was my abiding memory, I’m afraid.”