It seems like the Balti Bhujon has been part of the Mill Road street scene forever – somehow timeless, unchanging and allowing us easy, instant access to the tastes of the Indian subcontinent.

Located at number 24, this large restaurant and takeaway is always popular.

If you make a visit there, the chances are you will bump into Abdul.

Always very smartly dressed and welcoming, Abdul has become part of Maldon’s history because, along with his uncle, he opened the very first Indian restaurant here, back in 1978.

But that was not in Mill Road, rather it was where Chilli is now located, on the corner of Butt Lane.

Not long after, in the early 1980s, the building at 24 Mill Road became the second Indian restaurant to be established in town.

Initially called Tandoori Garden, it then became the Raj and finally, under Abdul’s watchful management (and now with his son-in-law Jay at front of house), it is the familiar and much-loved Balti Bhujon.

Abdul takes great pleasure in seeing people enjoy his chef’s food and encourages young and old alike to sample it.

But if number 24 has only been a curry house for say 40 years, what was it before that?

Its size, shape and layout, not least the vast dining space (that can still seat 110 people) suggests that it might well have been some kind of eating establishment even before curry started being served there.

Some of us have vague memories of going to discos there and, sure enough, we find in the records that it was once Brooks’ Restaurant.

There was a traditional cafe at the front and the hall, or rear section, was used for private functions – parties, wedding receptions and the like.

It gets a bit confusing, however, because at one time 24 seems to have shared space with 22a. However, it was Brooks post and pre-Second World War.

My maternal grandmother worked there as a waitress in 1944 and at that time, and later still, it was run by a lady called Gwen.

It was a Charles Brooks who initially had a refreshment room there during the period 1926 to 1937, but adjacent, or incorporated into the building, was a ladies’ hairdressers run by Mrs R A Rudkin in 1937 and earlier, from around 1929, Miss Queenie Brooks.

Prior to that we have another familiar local name – Boreham.

Alfred Ernest Boreham (1865-1932) based his family and his shoe repair business there from 1891 to 1926.

It needed to be a good size during his tenure – as evidenced in the 1911 Census, when Alfred was there with his wife, Eliza Jane Eleanor (née Keeble, 1867-1918) and four of their children, William, Reginald, Harry and Edith, and boarder Thomas Sterne, a printer from Thetford.

The family had grown somewhat over three decades. Just Alfred and Eliza (known as Jinny) were at number 24 in 1891 (they had married in 1887).

He was a general warehouseman at that stage, but had become a cobbler by 1901 and had his wife, children, the aforementioned William and Reginald, there with him, but also older offspring Gertrude and Alfred.

Of those six Boreham children in total, I actually knew Harry (1901-1988) because, along with his wife Winifred (née Sach), by a strange coincidence they were next door to my former waitress grandmother, at another 24 – 24 Church Street.

I had no idea that he had once lived in what would become the Balti.

My mother remembers visiting the neighbours as a child and was allowed to play with a large collection of shoe repair tools in the shed and with two “big bronze coins”.

It is only since undertaking my research into Maldon and the Great War that I realise just what they were.

Go and look at our town war memorial outside All Saints’ Church and among the Bs you will see no fewer than four Borehams – George (as yet still unidentified), Ernest (son of William and Eliza, accidentally drowned in Mesopotamia), but also Alfred and Reginald, two of Alf and Jinny’s boys.

Alfred was killed in action in Armentieres in 1916, aged 23, and Reginald at Cambrin in 1918, aged just 19.

Harry had kept the only mementos of his two siblings – the so-called Dead Man’s Penny.

It’s far removed from the enjoyment of a tasty curry, but all of those players – restaurateurs, hairdressers and, of course, a cobbler and his kin – have one thing in common: 24 Mill Road.

Somehow our visits there will never quite be the same again.