Description: Looking west along Chapel Street with the post office (which offers a public telephone) on the left and the Wesleyan Methodist chapel (which presumably gave the street its name) and its attached Sunday School to the right. Immediately beyond the latter is the junction with Chapel Lane, while more distantly the bell turret and roofline of the village school (mixed and infants) can also be seen. The high brick wall opposite this encloses the grounds of Spondon House. A group of children have gathered around the photographer's Douglas motorcycle (registration R 711) - one unfortunate boy appears to have been in the wars as he has a bandage around his head.
By the end of the 1930s the post office had moved to a new location on Sitwell Street but the building seen here still stood in 2012, in use as a hairdresser's. Although somewhat modernised most of the other buildings in this view also survived, the exception being the chapel, which had been replaced by a new structure, utilised as a Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses. And while Spondon House itself had been demolished, its boundary wall remained intact.
Derby-based postcard publisher F W Scarratt took this photo and numbered it 836 in his series. See DCHQ500197 and DCHQ501462 for different versions of the resulting postcard - it is worth noting that when published Scarratt chose to remove the blurred figure second from the right. With the long exposure times needed for photography at this date, moving people and vehicles were something of an occupational hazard.