Headway House

Once upon a time there used to be a company called Bytes living in Ewell Village, a company which I think used to specialise in supplying networks and computers to medium sized businesses in the area. In premises which is now a hairdresser or perhaps a beauty salon. At some point, after we moved into the area thirty years ago, they moved into larger premises at Chessington Road, a little to the east of Ewell West railway station. Quite recently they moved again from there to new premises in Leatherhead and their old premises were converted into flats, now called Headway House, by a company called Niblock Construction, the name, as it happens, of a longtime neighbour. It may have been called that before; there is certainly a road called 'The Headway' behind.

My belief is that Bytes was a one or two man start-up in the 1970's and has grown to be part of some larger empire, but is still trading under their original name. See reference 1.

I may have got the history of the company all wrong, and it turns out yesterday that I had certainly got Headway House all wrong. The snap left is part of their boundary wall and closer inspection of the hole revealed that it is a chimney, not a doorway half blocked by a rising forecourt. From which we deduce that the building which is on the site now bears little relation to what was there in the past. Must have walked past the thing hundreds of times and never noticed it before.

All compounded by misbehaviour on the gmaps front. If you paste what I think is the postal address of Headway House into gmaps - 'Headway House, 15 Chessington Road, Ewell, Epsom KT17 1TS' - you get taken to the current premises of Bytes in Leatherhead. While if you just type in the postcode bit, you get taken to West Ewell, the real home of the postcode in question. To add insult to injury, if you try to zoom in on the satellite view to see if that offers any clues to the history of the building, you get flipped into street view. A street view which seems to come with a lot more rotation than I had bargained for. Perhaps I am too old for the product.

PS: very much the area which was the subject of the dispute noticed at reference 2.

Reference 1: http://www.bytes.co.uk.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/never-mind-runway-feel-backland.html.