Gloucester Court Reminiscence Group

With the oldest resident at 91 years of age and a combined age of the group approaching 700 years, this meeting at my art studio was a pleasure to record. We started off viewing some old photos of North Kensington, followed by a few short film extracts. Over a cup of tea, we shared memories of housing from the 1930's-70s. 
Here are a few extracts:

Susanne Medas talking about living with her husband in a flat at 38 Royal Crescent: "The road at Royal Crescent is curved slightly and (laughs) a friend of mine had given us some money, £25. So we bought a very nice double bed at Heal's. And we were going to put this bed into the front room. But it turned out the the walls were curved....There was a fire place that took up the best of one wall. Then there was this front window and the door was curved. (Laughs). And there was no way that we could put this double bed anywhere. We had to exchange it in Heal's for two single beds. That's how we started off."

Barbara Tyrrell: "I got married and moved to Winterbourne House (in Portland Road) with my husband and his father. His father had been recently widowed and so we moved in to look after him as he was getting quite elderly. I then had twins. We had no lift in that block of flats. There were 68 stairs and I had to try and take up a twin pram up 68 stairs. It was either a choice of taking up the shopping and leaving the twins behind or taking up the twins and leaving my shopping behind. What was going to get stolen, I don't know."

John Neville: "My story contrasts a little with the others. I lived in Elgin Crescent from 1945 when I was born. And hard to believe, that was rather posh. Rather a nice street. No, I wouldn't say it was posh. It was a council owned property. It was a Victorian semi-detached family home but my Dad managed to get if from the council, rented from the council. He was a Docker. And it always had an inside toilet. We always had a bathroom. We had a garden. In fact, the only thing we didn't have, we always had electricity, we didn't have a fridge. And we didn't have central heating.....Yes. We always had a telephone.... And it was Parks 7801."

I will be presenting audio extracts at my studio open day on 11th and 12th October as part of a film programme about post war housing.  
Many thanks to Maggie Tyler for organising the Gloucester Court Reminiscence Group session. More details of Maggie's work is at North Kensington Histories blog.