Memories of Onslow Street in the ’60s – and The Thriving Café Run By My Grandfather

Published on: 17 Sep, 2025
Updated on: 17 Sep, 2025

Onslow Street in days gone by. The City Café can be seen a few doors down where the cars are parked. Picture: David Rose

Dragon reporter David Reading takes a trip back in time

Just around the corner from where the Friary shopping centre now stands, in Onslow Street, there once stood a row of small businesses typical of those you would find in the approach roads to town centres all around the country. They included a newsagent’s, a social club, a shop that sold tools, a bookie’s and a second-hand furniture dealer.

They also included a café that was one of Guildford’s most popular lunchtime eating places during the 1960s and early ‘70s. For around five shillings (about £6 in today’s money) you could get a complete three-course meal – popular choices being oxtail soup, a main course of ham, egg and chips, and dessert of jam roly poly and custard.

The City Café was owned and run by my grandfather, George Reading, a businessman who prided himself on providing simple English fare at prices working people could afford. This was 60 years ago – before European and Oriental restaurants became widespread.

The café, on two floors, was presented like an old-fashioned tearoom, with white tablecloths and meticulously polished cutlery. It opened at 7.30am each morning, served a wide range of three-course meals at lunchtime and provided snacks like poached eggs on toast at teatime.

The City Café was popular among working people in that part of town: people like my first boss, Ted Adams, news editor at the Surrey Advertiser; the staff at Attfields men’s hairdresser in nearby Woodbridge Road; and white collar workers at the tax office on the corner of Leapale Lane.

If you couldn’t find a table on your own, you joined other diners at theirs. It was quite common for four people who hardly knew each other to share a table. And if one or all of them smoked, that was quite normal.

If you wanted something adventurous like a curry you had to go to the Shahee Mahal five minutes away but I do remember the City Café serving mulligatawny soup, which followed a South Indian recipe with a blend of Oriental spices.

George Reading, a well-known figure in Guildford, pictured in his fire officer’s uniform

George Reading had a career as an accounts manager at Dennis Bros and was also on call 24/7 as a retained firefighter, so he left the day-to-day running of the café to his manager and long-time friend, Kathleen Cantillon, who had come to Guildford from South Wales. The staff were made up entirely of women, mostly long-serving, hard-working people who helped run the café efficiently and with good humour. They included George’s wife Maud (my grandmother) and his sisters Violet and Deb.

George was almost obsessive about serving high-quality food, but not all of it was fresh. Staple foods like pies, puddings and chips were prepared by hand from scratch, but vegetables such as carrots, peas and new potatoes were delivered in large cans and stacked up in piles in the storeroom until needed. This was the way of things in the 1960s.

My memories of the catering operation at the City Café are pretty reliable because I spent six weeks in the summer of ’65 doing a variety of tasks from washing dishes to painting the walls. Eventually I left in September of that year to take a job as a reporter at the Surrey Ad, and about a decade later – or thereabouts – George Reading had to shut up shop to make way for the building of the Friary centre.

Onslow Street soon before demolition. You can see that Angel Son and Gray, at the far end, has already gone. Picture: David Rose

Local historian and Dragon colleague David Rose has provided me with a list of business that occupied Onslow Street at that time. Apart from the City Café they included Angel, Son and Gray; the Guildford Jubilee Social Club; P J Equipments Ltd; the Oddfellows; the Friary Recreation Club; Jon’s (The Cleaners) Ltd; J. D. Parsons, tool dealers; Locker Freeze Ltd, poulterers; Trevor Machin, turf accountant; Babbingtons, the newsagents; J Wilmot, timber merchants; Arthur Atkinson, furniture dealer; and the Onslow Valet Service.

On the corner, opposite Bridge Street, you had Laslett’s, the men’s clothing shop.

Perhaps there are Dragon readers with their own memories of this part of town at that time?

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