On the pavements, street vendors grilled spits of chicken and sold water pistols, fruit and sunglasses.
A few decades down the line, over the main road in Granby, residents remaining on Cairns Street have been living among boarded-up empty houses for so long now, they have tried to make the best of things: flowers along the pavements, street tables and chairs, murals on the cold sheet metal.
There are new shops, but tens of thousands of citizens are still eking out a living in the kind of cloth-on-the-pavement street trading which began after the USSR vanished, or have been forced to work as low-paid migrant workers in the EU's shadow economy.
At Oxford Circus, where tourists, office workers and shoppers usually battle for space on the pavement, the streets have been noticeably quieter than usual.
The massive hole opened up on Rideau Street on later Wednesday morning, sucking pavement and street signs deep underground, where engineers have been tunneling for months to build a new metro system for the city's downtown core.
Recent heavy rain in the Italian capital has washed droppings off trees into the street, making pavements and streets dangerously slippy.
Come on a Saturday when shop owners display their stock on the pavement and street food vendors fire up their barbecues.
Who, when attempting to navigate the encroaching hazards of the modern city pavement – the street furniture, the chuggers, the rugby scrums of student groups, the kerb-mounted cars and lamp-post-locked bikes – hasn't dreamed of doing a Richard Ashcroft in this celebrated video and bullishly shouldering, elbowing and steamrollering their way through the lot of them?
Improvements to the roads, pavements and street furniture will also be undertaken in Taff Street, Market Street, Mill Street and Church Street as part of the project.
Some residents have to cough up for maintaining the roads, pavements and street lights, looking after the parks and providing security.
