Housing

[What was the housing like?]
Well it was all flats. None of them were modernised, so you shared a toilet . there were six flats in a block and each side shared the toilets, and the sculleries with sink and water and things like that.

We didnt take any notice because everybody was the same. Then I went to Roupell Street. That was a six-roomed house, three bedrooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs. [There] were old sculleries years ago but then they were made into kitchenettes, but the toilet was still outside. And up until I moved from Roupell Street, last year I still had the outside toilet. And I never had no proper bathroom. The bath was in the kitchenette and I used to have a table top on it all the time.

[Were there any public baths round here?]
Only Lambeth Baths, thats all. Just off of Lambeth Walk that was, thats if you wanted to go to the bath. But you see, we used to have what they called a bungalow bath, and that was a long tin bath - usually people used to hang them on the wall out in the garden, and of course then you used to have to hot up your water. My mum had a gas copper and she used to hot the water up to have the bath with the gas copper.

Our son was born in 72 and we still lived in that flat when he was born, and we had one outside toilet and there was three families, one sink and one cold tap, and that was it. You carried your water into the kitchen. But then when they modernised them, we were lucky enough to get one of the first flats thats been modernised. And I used to love looking out the window when he was big enough to run around downstairs. J, come on, its bath time, because we had a bath!.Wed never had a bath before, but it was wonderful.

When we went to visit someone we used to have a bath, didnt we? I used to go round me mums, you know. .You had a bath once a week and that was it, you thought that was fair. I mean, now, we jump in the shower every day, but in those days nobody thought anything of it. That was it.

IPC, the big tower, Millroy Tower is it?on that site were some beautiful, really beautiful Georgian houses. All the doorways were complete, the windows, absolutely lovely, it looked like something out of Middlemarch, absolutely, and in one fell swoop they just knocked the lot down, and they build this ruddy great office block.

All the houses years ago always had big aires, what they used to call aires. You used to have steps going down and people used to live in the basement really, but they always used to call them houses with airesYears ago, when the Thames overflowed, a lot of people at Millbank there, before they built up all those big offices, thats where it was a lot of people got drowned.

my dad would come and visit and hed say, Weve got to get you out of this area. He used to say, I dont want you living in Waterloo. Got to get you out of this area. Little did he know People will kill for a place in this little area now, you know. Strange isnt it, its so weird.

You hear of policemen now saying they cant afford to live in London, which is a shame, and yet Edward Henry, off of Stamford Street, on Cornwall Road, when we were younger that was just police residenceIn the 60s the whole estate was just police families.

Them days it was very, very sociable. I mean, in them days there [were] 460 families, and used to be five apartments on a floor and you used to share communal toilet, communal wash basins. But once youd done that - I mean, it seemed primitive, but the point is the elderly people, disabled people or anything like that, you knew where they was around because you cant hide going to the toilet or going to getting washed, water and all the rest of it. So you knew they was around. As soon as it was modernised they reduced it down to 216 families, put front doors that self-contained each flat and once you started that people become isolated The community spirit sort of ended. When I first moved over there and I had two children, two boys, well them two boys had four and odd mothers, cos if they played up in the square its for every mum, but now, to be quite honest, if they was play out on the square now probably nobody would take a blind bit of notice because nobody knows whos who.

Roupell Street has always been a nice road, even years ago you was always thought to have money if you lived in Roupell Street and you had to pay a quarters rent in advance to get into the house in any case, so therefore you never got anybody who really didnt pay their rent, not really. .And once you moved into Roupell Street you never really moved out again. But years ago you could go out one week, if you wanted to move, and find somewhere the next week, but of course you cant do that now, can you.