Broadway and the High Road are valuable to local-history visitors because surviving buildings sit among sites where important Pitsea landmarks have disappeared. The area records the period when Pitsea was developing rapidly between the railway age and the creation of Basildon New Town.
Local businessman and landowner Harold George Howard played a major role in shaping the Broadway during the late 1920s and 1930s. His developments included mock-Tudor shops and flats, the Railway Hotel and the Broadway Cinema. The distinctive Tudor-style commercial architecture became one of the area's best-known features.
The Broadway Cinema opened in March 1930 and later became known as the Century. It provided far more than films, with entertainment that included stage events and wrestling. The cinema eventually closed as a cinema in 1970 and the building later had other uses before disappearing from the streetscape.
The large mock-Tudor Railway Hotel opened in 1927 and was another major Howard-era landmark. It replaced an earlier Railway Hotel/Tavern associated with the growth that followed the arrival of the railway. The later hotel survived for decades before eventually closing and being demolished during twenty-first-century redevelopment.
Parts of the Broadway's old shopping architecture survive and give visitors a better sense of the inter-war town centre than modern retail development alone can provide. Banks, butchers, dairies, clothing shops, grocers and many other businesses occupied these streets over the decades.
The dedicated Broadway pages record individual shops and businesses in much greater detail, while the Pitsea Market section follows the market through its changing locations.