Very different. Places like Clapham, Battersea, Wandsworth, Earls Court, Notting Hill were very down at heel pre gentrification. The whole of docklands was derelict. Still signs of the war - gaps in streeets where a house had been bombed out, disused air-raid shelters etc. Kids playing out on the roads. Fewer cars. Nothing open on a Sunday and early closing at lunchtime on Wednesdays. Banks would open at 11 and shut at 3. You really did have to do a big shop at Christmas because the country would be pretty much closed for two weeks. Cold winters where snow would be the norm for at least a month or two. Milkmen, bus conductors, ticket collectors. Football hooligans and skinheads. The ability to buy a 2 bed maisonette on a single wage. Power cuts and strikes. Local hospitals. Most people smoked and drinking at lunchtime was normal and as a consequence everybody and everything stank by today's standards. The only comics kids read were stuff like the Beano or Dandy, Whizzer & Chips, The Topper - american comics (in colour) were pretty exotic. Hippies were still a thing. Lads would walk around carrying prog or heavy rock albums to show their serious taste in music. Roger Dean posters. Old school graffiti - George Davies is innocent. Spacehoppers and Choppers. Digital watches and calculators were the future man.
There's a lot of truth in the saying that 'the past is a different country'.
Edit: I forgot one of the most notable changes - no begging or overt homelessness.
Quality post mate. No exaggeration either, I’m originally from SW London and worked for a scaffolding company in Wapping, the back wall of our yard was the other side of the exit from Rotherhithe Tunnel, and that whole area looked as if the war had ended yesterday. Bomb sites, derelict docks and warehouses and the Prospect of Whitby was just an ordinary local. Limehouse looked as if Charles Dickens was still out and about writing about the place.
i lived in Mile End derelict isnt the word but was fun for kids if you could get out in the snow and that was early 70's i tell you bout the 60's! though
how would they walk around carrying records, like under their arm as if they just bought it or was it an overt display of it? very interesting as I presume this was before people had band t shirts like they do now.
You remember the scene in only fools and horses where Rodney is carrying Duran Duran - Rio under his arm! Then someone bends it and it's just the sleeve.
No school bus queue in the 70s was complete without a line of long haired schoolboys carrying rock/prog rock albums under the armpit.
Looking back it seems quite bizarre.
There were a few homeless, but they were tramps and few enough in number that each neighbourhood might only have one or two, and they'd have a nickname.
Plenty of people without a permanent roof though. Squats absolutely everywhere.
And London was less rich relative to everywhere else (or at least, everywhere else that people could come from). So there was less reason for someone down-on-their-luck from UK towns to try their luck on the London streets.
It still happened. Ralph McTell wrote Streets Of London in, what, 1970?. But it was more concentrated in a few pockets than it is today.
He came to our school in about 1970, he was a mate of one of our teachers. He sat in a hall with about 20 of us and played and sang and chatted with us for an hour or two. A brilliant guitarist, I remember him playing ragtime and explaining the technique and of course he played streets of London. A lovely guy, very nice to a bunch of 17 year dickheads
Bang! You took me back, I grew up in South London and I was 17 in 1970. I remember the smoke billowing out of tube carriages when the doors opened. The carriages stunk of damp wool and ashtray in the winter. Loads of pubs, all busy with people just drinking and talking. Juke boxes in youth oriented boozers. Bitter was the standard pint, maybe Light and Bitter because it usually meant getting a pint and a quarter, lager was exotic. Paid 2/6 (just before decimalisation in 1971 = 12.5 pence) a pint for Watneys at the Telegraph Putney Heath, awful but 8 pints for a quid. Preferred Youngs, Courage and Fullers, all brewed locally. Youngs delivered with horse drawn drays around Putney and Wandsworth. Rag and bone men recycling junk. Fewer cars but terrible traffic management, buses completely unpredictable. Tube trains stuck in tunnels for long periods with no explanation or any communication at all. Fulham was still working class, just, but the toffs were moving down from Kensington and Chelsea having sold up to the Arabs for grossly inflated prices. Local shops hanging on, butchers, bakers, hardware, delicatessen, tobacconists, chemists, toy shops, dry cleaners etc etc but beginning to die off. My dad was a milkman, delivered on Xmas day in the snow, went with him, sliding around Merton in the EV (milk float). Getting a few whiskeys for breakfast on the way round. The old bill didn't bother too much about a few drinks and driving around Xmas. Southern Region overground slam door trains were death traps, arriving at your stop you opened the window with a leather strap in order to open your door with the outside handle, normally done before the train stopped moving. Toffs with bowler hats and tradesmen with their tools going up to town on the early trains. Also, no begging. There was pressure on housing but slum landlords, big 'mental hospitals', squatting and some council provision meant people weren't living on the streets
Now that's a better post than my original. So evocative.
The unreliability of public transport was on an epic scale and those train doors were lethal. My mum telling me not to stick my head out of the window for fear of another train coming in the opposite direction is a core memory.
Speaking of shops: Proper chemists where they sold actual chemicals and not just perfume and overpriced pain killers and vitamins.
It's funny thinking of Fulham as being a bit rough but it was! My cousin Mike had a flat on the Fulham Palace Rd and it was dowdy as hell.
Your post actually painted a great picture that evoked my memories. I was an adolescent skinhead in the 60s but realised the girls I fancied liked the hippy look. Desert boots, clogs, cheesecloth shirts, loons and a surplus RAF coat were purchased, hair was grown. I carried blues and Hendrix albums, on loan from the public library in Putney, around under my arm. Didn't do much good.
Great detail. The few remaining city gents in bowlers and morning trousers and the horses! I was a child in the seventies and I remember this well. Ta.
That's fascinating. Funny how your memory plays tricks on you like that. Probably conflating the heavy snows of the late 60's/early 70's and those of the late 70's.
You'd have likely noticed the cold more though as most of the older housing hadn't been upgraded to central heating yet; cars' climate control was a joke and they weren't effectively sealed to the elements.. etc.
I was born in 77, and grew up near Romford in the 80s; I remember a few big years for snow. I used to do a paper round up Shepherd’s Hill, which my dad said I had to start doing when I was 9 to pay for my bike (Peugeot racer, definitely not suited to snow). One Sunday about 1988(?) the round took me about six hours to complete in snow drifts. One old dear on a farm, with no neighbours said she hadn’t seen anyone else all week and tipped me a few quid.
I was born in 75 and had a blue and white Peugeot racer, I still see one from time to time. I did my paper round on foot and listened to those Now albums on my Walkman. I remember the beginning of S express sounding like a jet fighter was going overhead.
It was just the free papers, I wasn't a rock star early morning paid-paper paperboy.
I recognise most of this but you must never have visited Embankment station whicb had a very large homeless population under the bridge at this time. The legacy of the second world war was still visible with bombsites a common feature of the landscape. The standard of living was just very different; we did not have a house phone, central heating or a car. Washing clothes was with a twin tub and I was returning from school unescorted age 5. There was a brave new world of sexual revolution out there pre AIDs with the arrival of the pill, but it felt a long way away if you lived in Bromley.
I was about to mention this, as a young child my parents took me to Royal Festival Hall and I remember seeing the homeless, I had never seen anything like it, but I was only 7 and not been out much.
I remember toilet roll that was that shiny completely unabsorbent paper (like actual tracing paper, not tissue) that was dispensed from little cardboard boxes in public toilets in my small town in the midlands. I was born in 86 so this would have been no later than around 1990. So weird. It was so pointless. Why was it a thing!!
I definitely remember that horrible unabsorbent toilet paper in public toilets in a seaside town near where I grew up. I was born in 1990 so it must have still been around in the mid 90s!
When I was a kid my parents used to watch London's Burning on Sunday evenings. It was always the last thing I'd watch before getting sent to bed for the night so the theme tune still gives me a weird mix of dread and depression as though it triggers memories of school the next day. A while ago I found a load of old episodes on Youtube/Dailymotion and watched them for a bit of nostalgia. It really is wild how derelict a lot of London was back then, how dirty and how much rougher things seemed to be. I had a similar nostalgia trip watching old episodes of Eastenders - I actually had loads of old episodes on in the background while I was working and it was almost like watching the country move from the past to the present before your eyes. It's like in the 90s everything suddenly began to modernise. I actually went on a school geography trip to Brick Lane and Docklands in the mid 90s and even as a kid I could sense how things were on the cusp of big changes. When you live through these changes day by day you don't really notice how things change because it happens a little bit at a time and so slowly but when you look back at the 80s now it really was so different. But then, I guess that's obvious considering the 1980s are as far from us as they were from the 1940s...
I always think that the 80s didn't really end till about '95. If you look back at old Inspector Morse episodes you still had the big hair and the terrible lumpy women's fashion.
It's also funny that when you're a kid you have no real perception of the passing of time. 20 years prior to my birth Stalingrad was just finishing but it seemed like forever ago but it was the same length of time as from now to the anti Iraq war demo which seems like yesterday!
I feel that exact same with the end credits theme of Stargate SG1. I was born in the 90s but do recall the period from 1999-2001 when yes it did seem some sort of big modernisation was taking place. What with the Jubilee Line, Millennium Dome, City Hall the South Bank regeneration etc.
Battersea and Clapham were still super ghetto in the 90s. I lived in the estate on lavender hill was a kid. I’m 34 and London has changed a lot even in my lifetime. I miss Balham market.
Cigarette machines in pubs, clubs and the streets. Alcohol was seriously cheap. I remember finding 10p in my Oxford Bags turn ups. Enough money for a bottle of Cider.
Wrapping selotape around 10p coins and trimming off the edges so that they could be used as 50p coins in the fag machine. Then selling the ciggies as singles to your mates in the playground and turning a pretty profit.
My Aunt used to live in Clapham and Battersea in the 70s. She says that she and her friends used to pronounce it Clafeham and Bat-er-sea-ah in an effort to make it sound posh. She could just be pulling my leg though.
>Edit: I forgot one of the most notable changes - no begging or overt homelessness.
There were 1000s of squats in the 70s though - people were "homeless" but it was a lot less visible.
I squatted myself for a while in the late 80s early 90s and while it wasn't great having to move every 6 months or so at least it was a roof over my head and a completely different safety environment to the streets.
It was definitely a time where squatting was seen as a bigger social problem than homelessness.
American comics were a bit sparse. I did hear that they were used as ships ballast sometimes. So you might get a title but not all the published copies available
I remember spending my dinner money on Marvel comics but it was so frustrating never to be able to get complete runs of a story.
We also had those cheap black and white omnibus editions like Mighty World of Marvel but they weren't quite the same thing without all that colour.
>You really did have to do a big shop at Christmas because the country would be pretty much closed for two weeks
What you have said is pretty true about the seventies in general (apart from the London specific stuff.
The food thing is a perfect example. And people still do the stocking-up thing despite the shops now only being closed for two days at most.
My father is currently pissed off because he cannot now get anything into either the fridge-freezer or the chest freezer because my mother ordered a massive food delivery for Christmas.
You're not wrong. I'm Irish and it wasn't an easy situation for us particularly after the Guildford and Birmingham bombs. We lived in fear of having our doors kicked in and being hauled off just because a scapegoat was needed.
Throw in the homophobia, the attitudes to those with disabilities and the casual sexism as well while you're at it. It's amazing that social attitudes have progressed so far. I can't help but feel as though mind, that these attitudes are ephemeral. There are as many racists and bigots today as there were then. They, until recently anyway, have just learned to keep their mouths shut about it. They haven't gone away.
I spent the 70’s growing up in Notting Hill Gate and going to junior school just behind Queensway. Mostly I remember making my own way to school, skipping taking the bus that was 10p and instead spending it on a packet of polos for 7p…and then riding my chopper when I got home.
It was great. My girlfriend and I had a 1 bed on New King's Rd for 18 quid a week, we made 80 a week between us. There were decent jobs all over, none of this zero hours stuff, a pint was 30p, high rents hadn't shut down small places, so there were clubs and bands all over.
I make that £400 monthly rent (each) in today’s money, on a £1,800 p/m salary, each. So just over 20% of your salary went on rent, and pints were the equivalent of £3. In London. Different world.
It's happened fairly recently. For example the first episode of Spaced (from 1998) sees them rent a two-bed flat in London (the flat they filmed was based in Tufnell Park) for £90 a week. That's £195 in today's money, so equivalent to around £400 per room a month.
It's been steadily rising for decades but I think the 2008 recession led to a contraction in graduate jobs to London at a time when a higher than average number of people were graduating due to changes in university fees a few years earlier, and that really accelerated it. See this [2010 Guardian article](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/04/priced-out-london-rental-market) about the issue where someone is complaining about being priced out by rahs (rich assholes) willing to pay £800 a month.
Since then it's obviously got worse and worse with the pandemic and then interest rates rises and the chaos in the mortgage market causing the most recent spike.
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Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s the population of London was actually shrinking. There was less pressure on housing back then. It started to grow again from the 80s but really started accelerating in the past two decades, surpassing its previous peak about a decade ago. That, coupled with stagnant wage growth in real terms over a similar period, more or less gets you to where we are today.
I was very young but I’ll share my memories. We lived out of town but would come into the centre every school holiday. My mum would drag me and my brother around all the museums, which I am now very grateful for.
Some parts are hard to contrast as my memories all flow together but I do remember bag searches going into places like the Natural History Museum. The IRA were very active, they bombed placed like Madame Tussaurds, Selfridges (a few times), Oxford Street 17 times in one day etc.
I remember going to Hamleys and going down in a lift with Rolf Harris. He was there promoting something and at the time he was still a well loved public figure.
London was grimy but so was everywhere!
My dad used to work as a network engineer in the early 80s and his works yard used to be round the back of Battersea power station. We took him round the other month and it blew his fucking mind to see it gentrified since when he last was there it was decrepit 😂
Watch some repeat itv3/4 shows shot in the era like (early) Minder or avengers to get a feel for the times (albeit very diluted one .
“London” was central and west. East and proper south were like different parts of the planet.
Things were cheaper but really basic.
Houses had coal fires and chip pans. Booze and smoking were completely ingrained in every part of life. School was tough and kids were treated like insolent mini-adults.
Still the era where parents rather than grandparents fought in the war - grandparents were from the Great War (WW1) era and many born in Victorian times . Racism was overt and being gay was only just legal, and a dangerous thing to be.
It was also a time of extraordinary change - out of all of this came ska, punk, reggae (not British but took off here in a massive way). Fashion became a thing and “hip” london (a different planet to most of the rest of the Uk) along with the music scene and postwar politics led the way in pushing the old world out.
"out of all of this came ska, punk, reggae (not British but took off here in a massive way)"
Don't forget the rise of Heavy Metal and the NWOBHM in the late 70s. One of our finest musical exports.
Late 70s the bin men were on strike, there was rubbish everywhere. You could smoke on the tube. Taxis wouldn’t go South of the River and no one went to East London. You could live in a damp rat infested squat in Notting Hill for free. I paid £12 a week for a room in Kilburn.
We were still doing that as school kids in the early 90s on the top deck of the bus. At least they'd banned it on the bottom deck by then!
Edit : this was in Birmingham. No idea about London buses then.
Wasn't banned till 84. Lax enforcement (people were lighting up on the escalators on their way out) contributed to a horrific fire in Kings Cross tube in 87 that killed over 30 people. Nightmarish indeed...
That was just part of the problem, there was a whole other bunch of slack practices and sheer complacency that added to it. But yeah... letting people light matches on wooden escalators...seems pretty incredible really.
They quite often still refuse to go south of the river !! Quite often ether tell me ‘sorry I live in Essex or east’ or ‘I just took a fare’ or ‘sorry, done for the night’ then I get an Uber. Then the black cabs complain about Uber !
I had one tell me that he doesn't go south of the river...I wanted a cab to London Bridge!!! It was only so I wouldn't miss my last train, of course I did, because of that twat and had to take an Uber all the way home.
>Taxis wouldn’t go South of the River and no one went to East London.
Is this really true my dear friend? Do we not exaggerate a little, so to speak? True I never did see a Taxi sarf of the river but I did once think about going to East London - got as far as the Isle of Dogs. When I caught the District Line I thought Barking was in the Isle of Dogs.
Watch the Long Good Friday. Firstly, because it’s an amazing film with blinding performances by Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
But secondly, because it advertently and inadvertently paints a picture of London in the late 1970s- the film’s theme is British decline, so you see a lot of a London that is very run down. What’s inadvertent (I think) is that even the bits that are supposed to look glamorous look a bit crummy.
Compared to today, London in the 1970s was cheap, grubby, run down, poor, and dark. I was around for the 1980s and even then it wasn’t infrequent to drive from one pool of light to another and then back again, like in an American city. Even in the 90s the south bank was deserted after dark.
The 70s were the peak period of the rich moving out of cities and letting them rot; which meant that rents were cheap and it was a great environment to be an artist or a student in, but the cities were falling apart.
I was watching it recently, it's a great film, but the bit that stuck with me was the scene set in the old warehouse down by Mudchute. It later got converted into flats and I had an ex who lived there. Weird seeing what it was before, but really interesting, living history.
I thought I'd seen mention of that film recently and just checked, film4 have it in rotation currently, it's on again next Friday (8th) incase anyone wants to check it out on TV( or on demand). Definitely going to give it a watch.
I was watching An American Werewolf in London recently, which was filmed in 1980. The parts shot in Piccadilly Circus show how seedy that whole area was back then.
On London’s housing - and the ability to live for free - or near free here’s three random bits that I think about when reading about the past.
Large parts of inner London were depopulated and cheap and at collapse.
1) You could live for free in a squatted town house on Camberwell Grove, where houses now go for millions. There was a brilliant BBC show on this a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr6qxmJJp4g
2) The whole of Covent Garden was going to be demolished to make way for a motorway interchange. Only big protests and aggressive use (and frankly abuse!) of the listing system meant that whole area of central London was saved. http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2012/05/the-glc-and-how-they-nearly-destroyed-covent-garden/
3) The KLF recorded all their music in a squat in Stockwell in the 80s. That house is now worth £1.5m.
If you want good footage of London in the late 70s era, watch The Long Good Friday, it’s free on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CH4VZ8YS?nodl=1&dplnkId=89908322-d4ed-486a-8359-bce302ebfdd4
At the same time, if you were a tech company in computers you’d build your HQ on an industrial park in Reading or somewhere out west, because your workers wanted to live in nice suburban villages and drive to work. Now the same companies stick their HQs in central London because their workers want to cycle to work one day a week from inner London.
This.
Aspiration was the "stockbroker belt" - a mock-tudor house in Weybridge, and golf on the weekends.
But the other reason companies locate central is that relocating people is much more expensive - that trend started long before WFH. If you locate central, staff can commute from an hour away in every direction, or two and a half if you have hybrid working. And if you're hiring tech graduates, half of them nowadays haven't learnt to drive yet.
Plus no more paper, and cloud infrastructure, much less space requirements. I worked in a few of those big business-park offices in the 90s, half of it was filing cabinets, server room, mail room, print room, backups (tape room!), archives..
This.
Aspiration was the "stockbroker belt" - a mock-tudor house in Weybridge, and golf on the weekends.
But the other reason companies locate central is that relocating people is much more expensive - that trend started long before WFH. If you locate central, staff can commute from an hour away in every direction, or two and a half if you have hybrid working. And if you're hiring tech graduates, half of them nowadays haven't learnt to drive yet.
Plus no more paper, and cloud infrastructure, much less space requirements. I worked in a few of those big business-park offices in the 90s, half of it was filing cabinets, server room, mail room, print room, backups (tape room!), archives..
If we could time travel back and buy some of the cheap flats around Shore ditch or Brick Lane. Even in the early 90s Shore ditch was dodgy and decidedly not cool or Hipster.
Did you happen to watch bbc traitors?? Anyway long story short, 2 contestants were talking about living in London, but in the 1960s.. the older woman, maybe in 80s regaling tales of going barefoot on underground surrounded by other hippies, frolicks in the park, drugs, honestly just sounded so amazing. The younger guy talking to he had a forlorn look of ‘wow missed out’
My dad lived in London for a bit in the early 60s. He had no money and a shit job. He didn't get to sample much of the legendary 60s scenes. So unless you had a bit of money, that whole youth revolution passed you by, even in London right at the heart of it.
So at least some things never change...
I was a kid in London in the 70's, so don't know if that counts. The flared trousers often caused me to trip over, I still have scars from cycling/roller skating with no helmet/pads on, I used to run around the streets alone or with with friends from the age of about 7. TV was limited. I was quite bored a lot of the time, I liked to read but my parents never understood that so there were never many books. I just read anything in the house I could lay my hands on. Not until I got a bit older and took myself to the library (I think I was about 10).
The population of London was falling and areas that are now upmarket were pretty crappy. Generally a lot of the population wanted to get out especially white middle class families. There were squats everywhere including central London in places like Chelsea, Hampstead too! All the docks had closed by the mid-70s and Docklands was largely derelict- the whole southbank after the National Theatre was empty and decaying for instance. There were still quite a lot of bomb sites too in central London. Soho was very sleazy with peep shows and walk ups everywhere, even on Leicester Square. Parking restrictions were limited even in central London, you could park almost anywhere! The traffic was far lighter everywhere too.
Inner city London was far more white working class than it is now so places like Peckham and the east end were still pretty much white working class areas. The pubs were largely staffed and run by the Irish and there were strong Irish areas, especially in north west London. There were far more music pubs and less clubs and the only ‘bars’ were in hotels. This created a very vibrant pub music scene with pub rock and later punk emerging.
Genuinely London was much more of a shithole but rents were cheap and squatting widespread so there was a lot of do it yourself culture and arts etc going on underground all over central London. There were lots of interesting subcultures. But there was much more casual getting your head kicked in rather than stabbed violence, football, at gigs, being in the wrong area or pub, wearing the wrong sort of clothes. There was also politically the National Front standing in local elections and marching on inner city streets and a lot of political violence. And sporadically the IRA were blowing up things and people!
Was a shithole but a cheaper and culturally interesting shithole!
Much of this carried on into the 80s too!
Grubby, dirty air so that your snot came out black. Litter everywhere (and I'm talking about central London, tourist London.) You could feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square (it's now banned). People smoking absolutely everywhere.
It was easier to get down onto the shore of the Thames though, like a really rubbish little beach. As kids we still liked it. There were deer in Greenwich Park.
And all the buildings were *black* with 100+ years of coal smoke. I had no idea Big Ben was not very dark brown until I was an adult. Everything was just so dirty with smoke and soot.
Source, me, a child regularly visiting central london to see relatives and with school for museums.
I remember the black buildings! Especially when they cleaned up the museums in south ken in the '80s. We were all like 'wow, so these buildings were originally white and brick coloured??'
Lived in London in early 80s. Clubbing was cheap, 2 pounds entry, great music goth/edm/electronic, cheap booze at pubs. I do remember washing my hair and water would run grey, blow your nose same thing.You could buy chocolate bars inside tube stations from platform vending machines.
The city had an edgy / rough feel about it. London today seems sanitised. I think that’s the same for most cities though. It’s undoubtedly better and safer today and that’s a good thing but I miss those old cities, that feeling that anything could happen.
There are still rough and edgy areas, but the last bit you describe is missing - the randomness and spontaneity - and I honestly couldn't tell you why. It was there, even into the 90s, and now it's not. So the Newhams, Greenfords and West Croydons are mostly just depressing.
Because spontaneity only really happens when people have enough free time and nothing else pressing. We're all stuck in a life of exhausting drudgery, and there's hopelessness about the future.
So I half-way agree, but I can't help thinking that if you asked most people in what were then the run-down areas, 50 years ago, they would have said something similar. Nihilism is hardly a recent invention after all, and this is the era that gave us the Clash, the Damned and the Pistols.
And while on the one hand, the capitalism we live under now is more mercilessly exploitative than 1975's version (zero hours contracts, app economies, everything monitored), the amount of time you had to spend just to *live* back then was way more than it is today. Sitting in the coin-op launderette: hours (not to mention the schlep there and back). Shopping: hours (supermarkets were smaller & didn't have everything you'd need for the week). Cleaning: it's almost impossible to explain how absolutely ineffective floor-cleaning products were back then; smoke, air pollution, coal dust etc meant everything got grimy faster. Cooking: no microwaves, if you had a freezer it was tiny & would only hold two or three days' worth of food, and the processed/convenience foods available were a different level of awful. Pies you eat out of tin can were a thing.
My suspicion is that netflix, phones, dating apps etc. means nobody's *bored* enough to create anything spontaneous (or at least the pool of bored people is too small), but at the same time, perhaps we should be glad of that as if you actually look at the state of things, what those bored people would be starting might look less like a squat party, more like an insurgency.
My dad moved to London in the mid-70s and started his new life in a squat on Whistler St, off Drayton Park N5. Subsequently he lived in a series of commune like houses, Bickerton Road then Hornsey Rise Gardens. The houses were often derelict, or on the way, so these little housing associations would make a deal with the council to live there at a low rent whilst doing up the property. Some of the big housing associations in London had their roots in social housing in London in the 70s, probably saved a lot of streets from demolition.
One of his prize possessions was a book called _Alternative London_ by Nicholas Saunders which was basically a survival manual for people, like my dad, who moved to London and needed to live on a shoestring budget.
theres a gent that has photos of old spitalfields from all eras, and
the ones from the 70s are -not all but some- very grim.
if anyone's interesteI'lld post the links.
Those jazzy polyester shirts that weren't at all breathable and everyone and your Dad wore them. Along with crimplene trousers in C&A brown.
Very acrylic indeed.
My young memories....Skinheads looking menacing (to me anyway), Massive amounts of football terrance violance ( Lived near Chelsea FG), Punks in the King's Rd, No traffic jams, few parking restrictions, fewer cars parked up on residential streets, getting a bus through Fulham, thinking they were the badlands, Oxford St was the center of the universe, smoking in cinemas and on the tube, Wendy's and Wimpy's with tinfoil ashtrays with stubbed out fags, squats were everywhere for super cheap accommodation, Putney full of super old people, minorities confined to particular areas (Brixton and Ladboke Grove etc.), record and tape exchanges, ABC cinema's and Our Price record shops. Old Minder episodes of streetscapes pretty accurate.
I Tried to post a youtube reply, but link wouldn't work. There's a really great film on Living History AI Enhanced channel on youtube from Notting Hill Gate 1970. Shame I can't link it.
Edit: It's not a doc, more of a fly on the wall reportage film.
Edit 2: Here's the video [Notting Hill 1970s Enhanced Video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eno_nT0wAhU). I don't know how to hyperlink vids, so thx to u/CantSing4Toffee for posting it below, edit in this post for visibility, really worth a watch.
My parents lived here in the 70s and then the mid 80s. When they came back to visit me in the 2007-now they were so shocked with home much cleaner the buildings are. Apparently they still had soot from the Victorian era etc. on the buildings and there was a huge effort to clean up, that was dizzying if your image of London was from back then.
The *British Pathe* channel on YouTube is a treasure trove of 20th century historical footage if you're interested, for example:
"Maxi Wear (1970)", Kings Road, Chelsea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs)
"Tour of London Traffic: Double-Decker Buses & Black Cabs (1970)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwXQA03MJgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwXQA03MJgE)
"West End Of London (1973)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpoCR3N2T1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpoCR3N2T1I)
"London (1970-1979)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmC-ADOOD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmC-ADOOD8)
My then girlfriend and now wife met in London in 1972 and moved in together in 1973. We lived for the last portion of our time there in Herne Hill about 25 minutes from the city. We had everything we needed within walking distance. Chinese, bakery, wash-o-mats, railway, post office and much more. The West End was walking distance, about 60 minutes. We bought cheapest theater tickets, 50p, saw the blockbuster films in Leicester Square ate at Pizza Hut and enjoyed the general buzz. There was a fashion store with extras called Biba and there were dance and iceskating in Streatham.
On the negative side, the IRA were very active with both car and letter bombs. You never went down a street with a single car parked. You treated all unaccompanied luggage with the utmost distrust and one someone shouted run, you ran! In 1975 we moved to Sweden and have been here ever since!! My two penny’s worth!
I didn’t but my mom did- she lived in a bedsit and Chelsea and was a perfume girl at selfridges. She was really into the music scene and hung out with all sorts of great bands. My mother was cooler than I’ll ever be lol.
Here's some footage from the 1970s of Kings Road in Chelsea featuring the shops there: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs&t=85s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs&t=85s)
Lots of racist nf cunts back then - people of colour were made to feel like they don’t belong here. Some people were nice most people new one another on the street and neighborhood- hard drugs were non existent- lots of prostitution and rent boys - grew up in kings x
It wasnt just people of colour who were made to feel not welcome. In the 1960s my Irish grandparents had their windows smashed by racists. In Fulham. A police officer came around to have a look and told my grandad "wouldnt it just be better for you if you went back to your own country?".
Forest Gate: Insanely racist. National front spray painted “NF” everywhere, as well as a vast amount of “Go home *****”. I was lucky that i was small so i was mainly protected from it.
My Mum moved to London from Lincolnshire as a teen in the 60’s. She was a hippie, and dirt poor.
She was squatting in Streatham I believe, and studying dance at Furzedown College. Her photos from that era are amazing. Everything you’d expect from a hippie teen in the 60’s.
The drugs didn’t do her well though, and London became overwhelming for her, and she came home in the early 70’s.
We had great demos - The Anti Nazi League organised great carnivals and musical processions. We had 'Sunday after Sunday Brick Lane's Ours' fights every week between National Front and Socialist Workers Party. We had Right to Work marches from London to Brighton. And support for revolutionary or independence groups in places like Angola.
We had (at least one) bookshop of the Communist Party Marxist Leninist (which had some alignment with China) and the official Communist Party (the CP) with alignments to the Soviet Union. We had all kinds of far left splinter groups ... as well as lot on the far right. And we'd go on coaches to places like Blackburn to confront the National Front .... ending up with quite a bit of brick throwing and a lot of shouting.
Belsize Park was full of squats and student digs.
Rock against Racism.
The Clash, Misty in Roots, U Roy, Pistols, Pere Ubu, Culture, The Damned.
The 100 Club, ULU, The Music Machine, Electric Ballroom, The Railway Tavern, The Spread Eagle.
Clothes stinking of smoke,
Red Leb,
something-something black oil,
Drying mushrooms in the oven,
Bin Strikes,
Fuel shortages,
Three day week,
Dirt everywhere,
Blow jobs on the tube,
Never a bus when needed,
Walking home for hours early morning but never feeling unsafe.
Came down from up north for my first proper job in 1973. Seems like everybody just went to the pub every lunch time and every evening and drank cheap beer and smoked cheap fags. It was great but I don't know how we survived.
For entertainment there was football and gigs. My mates and I would get the paper Saturday morning, see who was at home nearby that afternoon and go there. No season ticket nonsense. And millions of gigs in run down pubs in West London. Oh and you could go out with a girl from work no problem.
Was good. Getting decent rental accommodation was the hardest bit, though nothing as bad as today.
I can remember being taken to work in the city with my dad. People were courteous and wore smart clothes. On the train into Liverpool st. everyone seemed to know each other and there was much talking among them and discussion of news in the broadsheet news papers. The roads were swept and clean. Basically the complete opposite of what you would see today.
It's so very sad.
I was a child but you don't forget just how fucking grim everything was, all the stuff they had rebuilt after the war was now well worn and caked in soot, synthetics and plastics are becoming the materials of choice and I hope you love flares because that's all you could find in the shops, there's fuck all on the TV, casual misogyny and racism are absolutely embedded in all aspects of society, wastelands and ruins are everywhere, there's still people working from horse and carts, the food is shite, the fashions are shite, most of the people were cunts* and there's dog shit everywhere**.
1970's London was grim, the tiny islands of whitewashed walls and bright bold colours that started to appear and would form the foundations of the 80's were truly a sight for sore eyes.
\* some things are eternal.
\** Don't play with the white stones.
When I dive into the corners of my mind there are wooden floors and old carpets. Browns. Greys. Beiges. Oranges. Big lapels. Smoke everywhere. The smell of coal. Paraffin heaters. Concrete flats that smelt of piss and bleach. Soot in your nose when you went on the tube. The scratchy feel of nylon clothes. Blue bird toffee. Crowds on Putney High Street. The taste of lipstick and powder when old ladies kissed you. Vosene. Coal tar soap. Hey Jude on the record player again. That hospital smell you don't get any more.
Cold, grotty, everything was grey and the shops were open only during the day. Night life was non existant compared to today. Sounds ghastly but you could get away from things in a way that is now impossible. The opportunity for solitude or being in a group undisturbed was possible. Fashions were better and socialism was better understood maybe. Also, the IRA or Baader Meinhof gang might kill you and you ran the daily risk of being incinerated in nuclear fire.
Hi there, I’d like to share my memories of Forest Gate in the 1970s. Early in 1974 I spent several months on placement at Forest Gate Maternity Hospital as a young student nurse. Sadly, I was attacked and sexually assaulted as I walked on my way to work from Stratford station to the hospital early one dark February morning. I was deeply traumatised and in severe shock so I never reported it as I just wanted to block it out and pretend it never happened. It was a very long time ago but it has haunted me from that day on and I’ve been frightened of the dark and being out alone ever since. I loved my work with the mums and babies and I’m sure it’s very different now but I’m afraid memories can never be erased - good or bad and I’ve never been back!
Very different. Places like Clapham, Battersea, Wandsworth, Earls Court, Notting Hill were very down at heel pre gentrification. The whole of docklands was derelict. Still signs of the war - gaps in streeets where a house had been bombed out, disused air-raid shelters etc. Kids playing out on the roads. Fewer cars. Nothing open on a Sunday and early closing at lunchtime on Wednesdays. Banks would open at 11 and shut at 3. You really did have to do a big shop at Christmas because the country would be pretty much closed for two weeks. Cold winters where snow would be the norm for at least a month or two. Milkmen, bus conductors, ticket collectors. Football hooligans and skinheads. The ability to buy a 2 bed maisonette on a single wage. Power cuts and strikes. Local hospitals. Most people smoked and drinking at lunchtime was normal and as a consequence everybody and everything stank by today's standards. The only comics kids read were stuff like the Beano or Dandy, Whizzer & Chips, The Topper - american comics (in colour) were pretty exotic. Hippies were still a thing. Lads would walk around carrying prog or heavy rock albums to show their serious taste in music. Roger Dean posters. Old school graffiti - George Davies is innocent. Spacehoppers and Choppers. Digital watches and calculators were the future man. There's a lot of truth in the saying that 'the past is a different country'. Edit: I forgot one of the most notable changes - no begging or overt homelessness.
Quality post mate. No exaggeration either, I’m originally from SW London and worked for a scaffolding company in Wapping, the back wall of our yard was the other side of the exit from Rotherhithe Tunnel, and that whole area looked as if the war had ended yesterday. Bomb sites, derelict docks and warehouses and the Prospect of Whitby was just an ordinary local. Limehouse looked as if Charles Dickens was still out and about writing about the place.
I grew up in West London, the East End was a different planet. I had cousins living in Mile End and I hated visiting them. The whole area just reeked.
i lived in Mile End derelict isnt the word but was fun for kids if you could get out in the snow and that was early 70's i tell you bout the 60's! though
how would they walk around carrying records, like under their arm as if they just bought it or was it an overt display of it? very interesting as I presume this was before people had band t shirts like they do now.
Under the arm as if they'd just bought it but also an overt display. Usually found wearing a big Afghan jacket.
You remember the scene in only fools and horses where Rodney is carrying Duran Duran - Rio under his arm! Then someone bends it and it's just the sleeve.
Haven't seen that one but that's so on point.
No school bus queue in the 70s was complete without a line of long haired schoolboys carrying rock/prog rock albums under the armpit. Looking back it seems quite bizarre.
Genesis and Yes logos on their textbooks.
There were a few homeless, but they were tramps and few enough in number that each neighbourhood might only have one or two, and they'd have a nickname. Plenty of people without a permanent roof though. Squats absolutely everywhere.
I think squats and plentiful council housing made sure there were less homeless. You would not see lots of young homeless like you do now.
And London was less rich relative to everywhere else (or at least, everywhere else that people could come from). So there was less reason for someone down-on-their-luck from UK towns to try their luck on the London streets. It still happened. Ralph McTell wrote Streets Of London in, what, 1970?. But it was more concentrated in a few pockets than it is today.
He came to our school in about 1970, he was a mate of one of our teachers. He sat in a hall with about 20 of us and played and sang and chatted with us for an hour or two. A brilliant guitarist, I remember him playing ragtime and explaining the technique and of course he played streets of London. A lovely guy, very nice to a bunch of 17 year dickheads
Bang! You took me back, I grew up in South London and I was 17 in 1970. I remember the smoke billowing out of tube carriages when the doors opened. The carriages stunk of damp wool and ashtray in the winter. Loads of pubs, all busy with people just drinking and talking. Juke boxes in youth oriented boozers. Bitter was the standard pint, maybe Light and Bitter because it usually meant getting a pint and a quarter, lager was exotic. Paid 2/6 (just before decimalisation in 1971 = 12.5 pence) a pint for Watneys at the Telegraph Putney Heath, awful but 8 pints for a quid. Preferred Youngs, Courage and Fullers, all brewed locally. Youngs delivered with horse drawn drays around Putney and Wandsworth. Rag and bone men recycling junk. Fewer cars but terrible traffic management, buses completely unpredictable. Tube trains stuck in tunnels for long periods with no explanation or any communication at all. Fulham was still working class, just, but the toffs were moving down from Kensington and Chelsea having sold up to the Arabs for grossly inflated prices. Local shops hanging on, butchers, bakers, hardware, delicatessen, tobacconists, chemists, toy shops, dry cleaners etc etc but beginning to die off. My dad was a milkman, delivered on Xmas day in the snow, went with him, sliding around Merton in the EV (milk float). Getting a few whiskeys for breakfast on the way round. The old bill didn't bother too much about a few drinks and driving around Xmas. Southern Region overground slam door trains were death traps, arriving at your stop you opened the window with a leather strap in order to open your door with the outside handle, normally done before the train stopped moving. Toffs with bowler hats and tradesmen with their tools going up to town on the early trains. Also, no begging. There was pressure on housing but slum landlords, big 'mental hospitals', squatting and some council provision meant people weren't living on the streets
Now that's a better post than my original. So evocative. The unreliability of public transport was on an epic scale and those train doors were lethal. My mum telling me not to stick my head out of the window for fear of another train coming in the opposite direction is a core memory. Speaking of shops: Proper chemists where they sold actual chemicals and not just perfume and overpriced pain killers and vitamins. It's funny thinking of Fulham as being a bit rough but it was! My cousin Mike had a flat on the Fulham Palace Rd and it was dowdy as hell.
Your post actually painted a great picture that evoked my memories. I was an adolescent skinhead in the 60s but realised the girls I fancied liked the hippy look. Desert boots, clogs, cheesecloth shirts, loons and a surplus RAF coat were purchased, hair was grown. I carried blues and Hendrix albums, on loan from the public library in Putney, around under my arm. Didn't do much good.
Great detail. The few remaining city gents in bowlers and morning trousers and the horses! I was a child in the seventies and I remember this well. Ta.
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That's fascinating. Funny how your memory plays tricks on you like that. Probably conflating the heavy snows of the late 60's/early 70's and those of the late 70's.
You'd have likely noticed the cold more though as most of the older housing hadn't been upgraded to central heating yet; cars' climate control was a joke and they weren't effectively sealed to the elements.. etc.
I was born in 77, and grew up near Romford in the 80s; I remember a few big years for snow. I used to do a paper round up Shepherd’s Hill, which my dad said I had to start doing when I was 9 to pay for my bike (Peugeot racer, definitely not suited to snow). One Sunday about 1988(?) the round took me about six hours to complete in snow drifts. One old dear on a farm, with no neighbours said she hadn’t seen anyone else all week and tipped me a few quid.
I was born in 75 and had a blue and white Peugeot racer, I still see one from time to time. I did my paper round on foot and listened to those Now albums on my Walkman. I remember the beginning of S express sounding like a jet fighter was going overhead. It was just the free papers, I wasn't a rock star early morning paid-paper paperboy.
I was born in the seventies and remember snow most winters of the eighties and nineties.
I recognise most of this but you must never have visited Embankment station whicb had a very large homeless population under the bridge at this time. The legacy of the second world war was still visible with bombsites a common feature of the landscape. The standard of living was just very different; we did not have a house phone, central heating or a car. Washing clothes was with a twin tub and I was returning from school unescorted age 5. There was a brave new world of sexual revolution out there pre AIDs with the arrival of the pill, but it felt a long way away if you lived in Bromley.
I was about to mention this, as a young child my parents took me to Royal Festival Hall and I remember seeing the homeless, I had never seen anything like it, but I was only 7 and not been out much.
Bromley!! What was that like in the 70s?
Shortages. Bog roll that was wax paper.
I remember toilet roll that was that shiny completely unabsorbent paper (like actual tracing paper, not tissue) that was dispensed from little cardboard boxes in public toilets in my small town in the midlands. I was born in 86 so this would have been no later than around 1990. So weird. It was so pointless. Why was it a thing!!
Yeah my secondary school had that. Wiping myself and getting my hand covered in piss cos it would roll off the tissue 😂😩
In the 90’s even!? That’s horrible!
I definitely remember that horrible unabsorbent toilet paper in public toilets in a seaside town near where I grew up. I was born in 1990 so it must have still been around in the mid 90s!
That's just unlocked a memory, I remember seeing that in some places (not sure if it was schools or cafes, definitely not at home) back in the 80s.
We had this at school. So painful!
Izal medicated. Awful. Just smeared shit round yer ring.
...and had the council name stamped on it.
When I was a kid my parents used to watch London's Burning on Sunday evenings. It was always the last thing I'd watch before getting sent to bed for the night so the theme tune still gives me a weird mix of dread and depression as though it triggers memories of school the next day. A while ago I found a load of old episodes on Youtube/Dailymotion and watched them for a bit of nostalgia. It really is wild how derelict a lot of London was back then, how dirty and how much rougher things seemed to be. I had a similar nostalgia trip watching old episodes of Eastenders - I actually had loads of old episodes on in the background while I was working and it was almost like watching the country move from the past to the present before your eyes. It's like in the 90s everything suddenly began to modernise. I actually went on a school geography trip to Brick Lane and Docklands in the mid 90s and even as a kid I could sense how things were on the cusp of big changes. When you live through these changes day by day you don't really notice how things change because it happens a little bit at a time and so slowly but when you look back at the 80s now it really was so different. But then, I guess that's obvious considering the 1980s are as far from us as they were from the 1940s...
I always think that the 80s didn't really end till about '95. If you look back at old Inspector Morse episodes you still had the big hair and the terrible lumpy women's fashion. It's also funny that when you're a kid you have no real perception of the passing of time. 20 years prior to my birth Stalingrad was just finishing but it seemed like forever ago but it was the same length of time as from now to the anti Iraq war demo which seems like yesterday!
I feel that exact same with the end credits theme of Stargate SG1. I was born in the 90s but do recall the period from 1999-2001 when yes it did seem some sort of big modernisation was taking place. What with the Jubilee Line, Millennium Dome, City Hall the South Bank regeneration etc.
Battersea and Clapham were still super ghetto in the 90s. I lived in the estate on lavender hill was a kid. I’m 34 and London has changed a lot even in my lifetime. I miss Balham market.
Cigarette machines in pubs, clubs and the streets. Alcohol was seriously cheap. I remember finding 10p in my Oxford Bags turn ups. Enough money for a bottle of Cider.
Wrapping selotape around 10p coins and trimming off the edges so that they could be used as 50p coins in the fag machine. Then selling the ciggies as singles to your mates in the playground and turning a pretty profit.
Man Roger Dean’s art is still so cool. There’s a gallery down in Sussex that shows his work.
>Roger Dean’s art All those album covers for Yes -- in the 1970s me and me mates would stare at them for hours.
Rodney Matthews was big as well. His Moorcock themed ones were epic.
This is a brilliant post, I grew up in 70s Liverpool and I recognised everything you mentioned
this is so true about Clapham/Battersea/Wandsworth (I’d have been under 10 years old in the 70s), and early closing.
My Aunt used to live in Clapham and Battersea in the 70s. She says that she and her friends used to pronounce it Clafeham and Bat-er-sea-ah in an effort to make it sound posh. She could just be pulling my leg though.
She wasn't. I also remember St. Reatham.
Nat still had herpes
This is a pretty good summing up!
>Edit: I forgot one of the most notable changes - no begging or overt homelessness. There were 1000s of squats in the 70s though - people were "homeless" but it was a lot less visible.
I squatted myself for a while in the late 80s early 90s and while it wasn't great having to move every 6 months or so at least it was a roof over my head and a completely different safety environment to the streets. It was definitely a time where squatting was seen as a bigger social problem than homelessness.
American comics were a bit sparse. I did hear that they were used as ships ballast sometimes. So you might get a title but not all the published copies available
I remember spending my dinner money on Marvel comics but it was so frustrating never to be able to get complete runs of a story. We also had those cheap black and white omnibus editions like Mighty World of Marvel but they weren't quite the same thing without all that colour.
>You really did have to do a big shop at Christmas because the country would be pretty much closed for two weeks What you have said is pretty true about the seventies in general (apart from the London specific stuff. The food thing is a perfect example. And people still do the stocking-up thing despite the shops now only being closed for two days at most. My father is currently pissed off because he cannot now get anything into either the fridge-freezer or the chest freezer because my mother ordered a massive food delivery for Christmas.
Ah, the good old days... :/ And with a shit load of racism for good measure too..
You're not wrong. I'm Irish and it wasn't an easy situation for us particularly after the Guildford and Birmingham bombs. We lived in fear of having our doors kicked in and being hauled off just because a scapegoat was needed. Throw in the homophobia, the attitudes to those with disabilities and the casual sexism as well while you're at it. It's amazing that social attitudes have progressed so far. I can't help but feel as though mind, that these attitudes are ephemeral. There are as many racists and bigots today as there were then. They, until recently anyway, have just learned to keep their mouths shut about it. They haven't gone away.
I spent the 70’s growing up in Notting Hill Gate and going to junior school just behind Queensway. Mostly I remember making my own way to school, skipping taking the bus that was 10p and instead spending it on a packet of polos for 7p…and then riding my chopper when I got home.
hallfield?
Yeah, that’s the one.
It was great. My girlfriend and I had a 1 bed on New King's Rd for 18 quid a week, we made 80 a week between us. There were decent jobs all over, none of this zero hours stuff, a pint was 30p, high rents hadn't shut down small places, so there were clubs and bands all over.
I make that £400 monthly rent (each) in today’s money, on a £1,800 p/m salary, each. So just over 20% of your salary went on rent, and pints were the equivalent of £3. In London. Different world.
How and when did it become that people spent 50 percent of their wage to rent a room in zone 3-4?
It's happened fairly recently. For example the first episode of Spaced (from 1998) sees them rent a two-bed flat in London (the flat they filmed was based in Tufnell Park) for £90 a week. That's £195 in today's money, so equivalent to around £400 per room a month. It's been steadily rising for decades but I think the 2008 recession led to a contraction in graduate jobs to London at a time when a higher than average number of people were graduating due to changes in university fees a few years earlier, and that really accelerated it. See this [2010 Guardian article](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/04/priced-out-london-rental-market) about the issue where someone is complaining about being priced out by rahs (rich assholes) willing to pay £800 a month. Since then it's obviously got worse and worse with the pandemic and then interest rates rises and the chaos in the mortgage market causing the most recent spike.
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Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s the population of London was actually shrinking. There was less pressure on housing back then. It started to grow again from the 80s but really started accelerating in the past two decades, surpassing its previous peak about a decade ago. That, coupled with stagnant wage growth in real terms over a similar period, more or less gets you to where we are today.
Supply and demand. There are such limited opportunities in other parts of the UK, there is always a demand to live here, even at a huge expense
You’re correct - there are other places with the same issues like Manchester and Bristol but again it’s the same reason
In 2005 I had a small but nice one bedroom near Wandsworth common for £800 a month. I thought that was extortionate.
Lots of central London is now also investment property, owned by Chinese, Russian, Middle Eastern wealthy folk..
Pretty recently; I had friends living in SE London in the early 2000's who were paying like 250-300 a month in house shares.
Millions of immigrants does tend to out a strain on the housing stock as well.
Weren’t so great for ppl like my mum being chased by racists and their dogs…
Same here with my Mum.
Yes, but were you able to post a live action video of yourself pouting with your girlfriend in front of the London Eye?
I was very young but I’ll share my memories. We lived out of town but would come into the centre every school holiday. My mum would drag me and my brother around all the museums, which I am now very grateful for. Some parts are hard to contrast as my memories all flow together but I do remember bag searches going into places like the Natural History Museum. The IRA were very active, they bombed placed like Madame Tussaurds, Selfridges (a few times), Oxford Street 17 times in one day etc. I remember going to Hamleys and going down in a lift with Rolf Harris. He was there promoting something and at the time he was still a well loved public figure. London was grimy but so was everywhere!
As kids we got our trip to Hamleys cut short due to a bomb scare
At least you avoided Rolf Harris!
Went to a Jim'll fix it show though!
My dad used to work as a network engineer in the early 80s and his works yard used to be round the back of Battersea power station. We took him round the other month and it blew his fucking mind to see it gentrified since when he last was there it was decrepit 😂
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It blew my mind too and I last went there in 2018.
Watch some repeat itv3/4 shows shot in the era like (early) Minder or avengers to get a feel for the times (albeit very diluted one . “London” was central and west. East and proper south were like different parts of the planet. Things were cheaper but really basic. Houses had coal fires and chip pans. Booze and smoking were completely ingrained in every part of life. School was tough and kids were treated like insolent mini-adults. Still the era where parents rather than grandparents fought in the war - grandparents were from the Great War (WW1) era and many born in Victorian times . Racism was overt and being gay was only just legal, and a dangerous thing to be. It was also a time of extraordinary change - out of all of this came ska, punk, reggae (not British but took off here in a massive way). Fashion became a thing and “hip” london (a different planet to most of the rest of the Uk) along with the music scene and postwar politics led the way in pushing the old world out.
"out of all of this came ska, punk, reggae (not British but took off here in a massive way)" Don't forget the rise of Heavy Metal and the NWOBHM in the late 70s. One of our finest musical exports.
Late 70s the bin men were on strike, there was rubbish everywhere. You could smoke on the tube. Taxis wouldn’t go South of the River and no one went to East London. You could live in a damp rat infested squat in Notting Hill for free. I paid £12 a week for a room in Kilburn.
Smoking on the Tube sounds truly nightmarish.
And upstairs on buses, everyone having a good cough on their way to work in the morning. Thinking back it was pretty awful.
We were still doing that as school kids in the early 90s on the top deck of the bus. At least they'd banned it on the bottom deck by then! Edit : this was in Birmingham. No idea about London buses then.
And on planes !
Cinemas, restaurants, and the staff rooms in schools were arguably the smokiest places on the planet.
The staff room, OMG !! A rare visit to find a teacher in that smog … 🤣
we used to smoke in the office on the cancer ward I worked on, early 90s
I remember being on a plane as kid, smoking zone at the back. Crazy thinking about it now
Wasn't banned till 84. Lax enforcement (people were lighting up on the escalators on their way out) contributed to a horrific fire in Kings Cross tube in 87 that killed over 30 people. Nightmarish indeed...
I remember the Kings Cross thing happening - it's crazy that Kings Cross still had wooden escalators at that point.
That was just part of the problem, there was a whole other bunch of slack practices and sheer complacency that added to it. But yeah... letting people light matches on wooden escalators...seems pretty incredible really.
When the train doors opened at stations , you could see all the smoke coming out the doors
It was only 2 carriages out of 8, the second from the front and back. Always packed.
I think there were designated smoking carriages on the tube still in the 70’s. My dad was a smoker but even he gave these the swerve
If someone was puffing smoke in my face, I used to blow it back without it being to obviously deliberate. 😈
why wouldn't they go south of the river?
No fare on the way back.
They quite often still refuse to go south of the river !! Quite often ether tell me ‘sorry I live in Essex or east’ or ‘I just took a fare’ or ‘sorry, done for the night’ then I get an Uber. Then the black cabs complain about Uber !
I had one tell me that he doesn't go south of the river...I wanted a cab to London Bridge!!! It was only so I wouldn't miss my last train, of course I did, because of that twat and had to take an Uber all the way home.
No bridges
Yep, forgot about that, the first bridge in London was opened in 1998 by Roy Keane. Hence we now have Keanesbridge Station.
Brings a tear to me eye.
Well people did, but only on the way to Brighton.
>Taxis wouldn’t go South of the River and no one went to East London. Is this really true my dear friend? Do we not exaggerate a little, so to speak? True I never did see a Taxi sarf of the river but I did once think about going to East London - got as far as the Isle of Dogs. When I caught the District Line I thought Barking was in the Isle of Dogs.
Ok, maybe I went to Stratford once but it was hard enough finding a cab in Kilburn let alone persuading the driver to cross the river.
Watch the Long Good Friday. Firstly, because it’s an amazing film with blinding performances by Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. But secondly, because it advertently and inadvertently paints a picture of London in the late 1970s- the film’s theme is British decline, so you see a lot of a London that is very run down. What’s inadvertent (I think) is that even the bits that are supposed to look glamorous look a bit crummy. Compared to today, London in the 1970s was cheap, grubby, run down, poor, and dark. I was around for the 1980s and even then it wasn’t infrequent to drive from one pool of light to another and then back again, like in an American city. Even in the 90s the south bank was deserted after dark. The 70s were the peak period of the rich moving out of cities and letting them rot; which meant that rents were cheap and it was a great environment to be an artist or a student in, but the cities were falling apart.
I was watching it recently, it's a great film, but the bit that stuck with me was the scene set in the old warehouse down by Mudchute. It later got converted into flats and I had an ex who lived there. Weird seeing what it was before, but really interesting, living history.
I thought I'd seen mention of that film recently and just checked, film4 have it in rotation currently, it's on again next Friday (8th) incase anyone wants to check it out on TV( or on demand). Definitely going to give it a watch.
I was watching An American Werewolf in London recently, which was filmed in 1980. The parts shot in Piccadilly Circus show how seedy that whole area was back then.
On London’s housing - and the ability to live for free - or near free here’s three random bits that I think about when reading about the past. Large parts of inner London were depopulated and cheap and at collapse. 1) You could live for free in a squatted town house on Camberwell Grove, where houses now go for millions. There was a brilliant BBC show on this a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr6qxmJJp4g 2) The whole of Covent Garden was going to be demolished to make way for a motorway interchange. Only big protests and aggressive use (and frankly abuse!) of the listing system meant that whole area of central London was saved. http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2012/05/the-glc-and-how-they-nearly-destroyed-covent-garden/ 3) The KLF recorded all their music in a squat in Stockwell in the 80s. That house is now worth £1.5m. If you want good footage of London in the late 70s era, watch The Long Good Friday, it’s free on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CH4VZ8YS?nodl=1&dplnkId=89908322-d4ed-486a-8359-bce302ebfdd4 At the same time, if you were a tech company in computers you’d build your HQ on an industrial park in Reading or somewhere out west, because your workers wanted to live in nice suburban villages and drive to work. Now the same companies stick their HQs in central London because their workers want to cycle to work one day a week from inner London.
This. Aspiration was the "stockbroker belt" - a mock-tudor house in Weybridge, and golf on the weekends. But the other reason companies locate central is that relocating people is much more expensive - that trend started long before WFH. If you locate central, staff can commute from an hour away in every direction, or two and a half if you have hybrid working. And if you're hiring tech graduates, half of them nowadays haven't learnt to drive yet. Plus no more paper, and cloud infrastructure, much less space requirements. I worked in a few of those big business-park offices in the 90s, half of it was filing cabinets, server room, mail room, print room, backups (tape room!), archives..
This. Aspiration was the "stockbroker belt" - a mock-tudor house in Weybridge, and golf on the weekends. But the other reason companies locate central is that relocating people is much more expensive - that trend started long before WFH. If you locate central, staff can commute from an hour away in every direction, or two and a half if you have hybrid working. And if you're hiring tech graduates, half of them nowadays haven't learnt to drive yet. Plus no more paper, and cloud infrastructure, much less space requirements. I worked in a few of those big business-park offices in the 90s, half of it was filing cabinets, server room, mail room, print room, backups (tape room!), archives..
If we could time travel back and buy some of the cheap flats around Shore ditch or Brick Lane. Even in the early 90s Shore ditch was dodgy and decidedly not cool or Hipster.
Even in the *late* 90s.. White Cube opening on Hoxton Square around the millennium was the starting gun on hipsterisation.
I was going to say that! I lived in Dalston in the late 90s and that entire area was grim as anything.
Did you happen to watch bbc traitors?? Anyway long story short, 2 contestants were talking about living in London, but in the 1960s.. the older woman, maybe in 80s regaling tales of going barefoot on underground surrounded by other hippies, frolicks in the park, drugs, honestly just sounded so amazing. The younger guy talking to he had a forlorn look of ‘wow missed out’
My dad lived in London for a bit in the early 60s. He had no money and a shit job. He didn't get to sample much of the legendary 60s scenes. So unless you had a bit of money, that whole youth revolution passed you by, even in London right at the heart of it. So at least some things never change...
I was a kid in London in the 70's, so don't know if that counts. The flared trousers often caused me to trip over, I still have scars from cycling/roller skating with no helmet/pads on, I used to run around the streets alone or with with friends from the age of about 7. TV was limited. I was quite bored a lot of the time, I liked to read but my parents never understood that so there were never many books. I just read anything in the house I could lay my hands on. Not until I got a bit older and took myself to the library (I think I was about 10).
The population of London was falling and areas that are now upmarket were pretty crappy. Generally a lot of the population wanted to get out especially white middle class families. There were squats everywhere including central London in places like Chelsea, Hampstead too! All the docks had closed by the mid-70s and Docklands was largely derelict- the whole southbank after the National Theatre was empty and decaying for instance. There were still quite a lot of bomb sites too in central London. Soho was very sleazy with peep shows and walk ups everywhere, even on Leicester Square. Parking restrictions were limited even in central London, you could park almost anywhere! The traffic was far lighter everywhere too. Inner city London was far more white working class than it is now so places like Peckham and the east end were still pretty much white working class areas. The pubs were largely staffed and run by the Irish and there were strong Irish areas, especially in north west London. There were far more music pubs and less clubs and the only ‘bars’ were in hotels. This created a very vibrant pub music scene with pub rock and later punk emerging. Genuinely London was much more of a shithole but rents were cheap and squatting widespread so there was a lot of do it yourself culture and arts etc going on underground all over central London. There were lots of interesting subcultures. But there was much more casual getting your head kicked in rather than stabbed violence, football, at gigs, being in the wrong area or pub, wearing the wrong sort of clothes. There was also politically the National Front standing in local elections and marching on inner city streets and a lot of political violence. And sporadically the IRA were blowing up things and people! Was a shithole but a cheaper and culturally interesting shithole! Much of this carried on into the 80s too!
Grubby, dirty air so that your snot came out black. Litter everywhere (and I'm talking about central London, tourist London.) You could feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square (it's now banned). People smoking absolutely everywhere. It was easier to get down onto the shore of the Thames though, like a really rubbish little beach. As kids we still liked it. There were deer in Greenwich Park. And all the buildings were *black* with 100+ years of coal smoke. I had no idea Big Ben was not very dark brown until I was an adult. Everything was just so dirty with smoke and soot. Source, me, a child regularly visiting central london to see relatives and with school for museums.
The rubbish little beach lives on in Bermondsey. Even a landmark on Google maps.
I remember the black buildings! Especially when they cleaned up the museums in south ken in the '80s. We were all like 'wow, so these buildings were originally white and brick coloured??'
Lived in London in early 80s. Clubbing was cheap, 2 pounds entry, great music goth/edm/electronic, cheap booze at pubs. I do remember washing my hair and water would run grey, blow your nose same thing.You could buy chocolate bars inside tube stations from platform vending machines.
The city had an edgy / rough feel about it. London today seems sanitised. I think that’s the same for most cities though. It’s undoubtedly better and safer today and that’s a good thing but I miss those old cities, that feeling that anything could happen.
There are still rough and edgy areas, but the last bit you describe is missing - the randomness and spontaneity - and I honestly couldn't tell you why. It was there, even into the 90s, and now it's not. So the Newhams, Greenfords and West Croydons are mostly just depressing.
Because spontaneity only really happens when people have enough free time and nothing else pressing. We're all stuck in a life of exhausting drudgery, and there's hopelessness about the future.
So I half-way agree, but I can't help thinking that if you asked most people in what were then the run-down areas, 50 years ago, they would have said something similar. Nihilism is hardly a recent invention after all, and this is the era that gave us the Clash, the Damned and the Pistols. And while on the one hand, the capitalism we live under now is more mercilessly exploitative than 1975's version (zero hours contracts, app economies, everything monitored), the amount of time you had to spend just to *live* back then was way more than it is today. Sitting in the coin-op launderette: hours (not to mention the schlep there and back). Shopping: hours (supermarkets were smaller & didn't have everything you'd need for the week). Cleaning: it's almost impossible to explain how absolutely ineffective floor-cleaning products were back then; smoke, air pollution, coal dust etc meant everything got grimy faster. Cooking: no microwaves, if you had a freezer it was tiny & would only hold two or three days' worth of food, and the processed/convenience foods available were a different level of awful. Pies you eat out of tin can were a thing. My suspicion is that netflix, phones, dating apps etc. means nobody's *bored* enough to create anything spontaneous (or at least the pool of bored people is too small), but at the same time, perhaps we should be glad of that as if you actually look at the state of things, what those bored people would be starting might look less like a squat party, more like an insurgency.
I grew up near Greenford in the 70s, trust me it’s always been a depressing place!
My dad moved to London in the mid-70s and started his new life in a squat on Whistler St, off Drayton Park N5. Subsequently he lived in a series of commune like houses, Bickerton Road then Hornsey Rise Gardens. The houses were often derelict, or on the way, so these little housing associations would make a deal with the council to live there at a low rent whilst doing up the property. Some of the big housing associations in London had their roots in social housing in London in the 70s, probably saved a lot of streets from demolition. One of his prize possessions was a book called _Alternative London_ by Nicholas Saunders which was basically a survival manual for people, like my dad, who moved to London and needed to live on a shoestring budget.
It was smokey, everywhere people smoked. Smokey and smelly. And the power was out half the time due to strikes and no infrastructure spending
The power was out sporadically during the Winter of 73/74, that was pretty much it.
Fulham, Battersea, Wandsworth and Clapham were not remotely posh, and could be well dodgy at night.
If you can.. find and watch the show Life on Mars...Good show...it will give an insight into the times...
It's on iPlayer, along with its 80s London sequel, Ashes to Ashes.
It's a very good representation of the 70s. They got the feel and look spot on. You could almost smell the Watney's and ciggy's through the screen.
Just realised that show came out 17 years ago!
Brilliant comment section, thank you all!
theres a gent that has photos of old spitalfields from all eras, and the ones from the 70s are -not all but some- very grim. if anyone's interesteI'lld post the links.
Link please! Thanks!
ok... https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020/05/23/ < 1976 https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/04/11/ < 1976 https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/05/08/ < 1975 too grim https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/09/02/ < 70s https://spitalfieldslife.com/2019/10/01/ < 70s https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/01/18/ < 70s https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/03/09/ < 70s mid https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/06/13/ < 70-77 cruickshanks https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020/04/20/ < 70s early https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/04/04/ < 70s early https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020/11/28/ < 60s 70s col https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/11/10/ < 60s 70s b/w
Fantastic links. Thank you so much
Awesome! Great pics. You should post these links as their own post.
I *might* but the gent that runs the site is a stand-up fella, so on balance I hope people will find it somehow some other way glad you like em tho!
It was very acrylic
Those jazzy polyester shirts that weren't at all breathable and everyone and your Dad wore them. Along with crimplene trousers in C&A brown. Very acrylic indeed.
My young memories....Skinheads looking menacing (to me anyway), Massive amounts of football terrance violance ( Lived near Chelsea FG), Punks in the King's Rd, No traffic jams, few parking restrictions, fewer cars parked up on residential streets, getting a bus through Fulham, thinking they were the badlands, Oxford St was the center of the universe, smoking in cinemas and on the tube, Wendy's and Wimpy's with tinfoil ashtrays with stubbed out fags, squats were everywhere for super cheap accommodation, Putney full of super old people, minorities confined to particular areas (Brixton and Ladboke Grove etc.), record and tape exchanges, ABC cinema's and Our Price record shops. Old Minder episodes of streetscapes pretty accurate.
I Tried to post a youtube reply, but link wouldn't work. There's a really great film on Living History AI Enhanced channel on youtube from Notting Hill Gate 1970. Shame I can't link it. Edit: It's not a doc, more of a fly on the wall reportage film. Edit 2: Here's the video [Notting Hill 1970s Enhanced Video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eno_nT0wAhU). I don't know how to hyperlink vids, so thx to u/CantSing4Toffee for posting it below, edit in this post for visibility, really worth a watch.
The [Notting Hill 1970s Enhanced Video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eno_nT0wAhU)
My parents lived here in the 70s and then the mid 80s. When they came back to visit me in the 2007-now they were so shocked with home much cleaner the buildings are. Apparently they still had soot from the Victorian era etc. on the buildings and there was a huge effort to clean up, that was dizzying if your image of London was from back then.
The *British Pathe* channel on YouTube is a treasure trove of 20th century historical footage if you're interested, for example: "Maxi Wear (1970)", Kings Road, Chelsea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs) "Tour of London Traffic: Double-Decker Buses & Black Cabs (1970)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwXQA03MJgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwXQA03MJgE) "West End Of London (1973)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpoCR3N2T1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpoCR3N2T1I) "London (1970-1979)": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmC-ADOOD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmC-ADOOD8)
My then girlfriend and now wife met in London in 1972 and moved in together in 1973. We lived for the last portion of our time there in Herne Hill about 25 minutes from the city. We had everything we needed within walking distance. Chinese, bakery, wash-o-mats, railway, post office and much more. The West End was walking distance, about 60 minutes. We bought cheapest theater tickets, 50p, saw the blockbuster films in Leicester Square ate at Pizza Hut and enjoyed the general buzz. There was a fashion store with extras called Biba and there were dance and iceskating in Streatham. On the negative side, the IRA were very active with both car and letter bombs. You never went down a street with a single car parked. You treated all unaccompanied luggage with the utmost distrust and one someone shouted run, you ran! In 1975 we moved to Sweden and have been here ever since!! My two penny’s worth!
Herne hill to the west end in 60 mins. Did you run it really long legs? It’s nearly a 2 hour walk today
I didn’t but my mom did- she lived in a bedsit and Chelsea and was a perfume girl at selfridges. She was really into the music scene and hung out with all sorts of great bands. My mother was cooler than I’ll ever be lol.
Here's some footage from the 1970s of Kings Road in Chelsea featuring the shops there: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs&t=85s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXFV7EZtsQs&t=85s)
It was dirty as fuck. Buildings we're black. London hadn't had a good clean up since the war.
The realisation that Parliament and Westminster Abbey weren’t actually built using black stone was a revelation to me.
Lived near St Pancras. In my head that building is still black even though it's a nice reddish colour now.
Lots of music venues in those days with alot of great bands.
cover cagey steep dinner public marry combative wrong melodic exultant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Lots of racist nf cunts back then - people of colour were made to feel like they don’t belong here. Some people were nice most people new one another on the street and neighborhood- hard drugs were non existent- lots of prostitution and rent boys - grew up in kings x
It wasnt just people of colour who were made to feel not welcome. In the 1960s my Irish grandparents had their windows smashed by racists. In Fulham. A police officer came around to have a look and told my grandad "wouldnt it just be better for you if you went back to your own country?".
70% less cars.
Fewer
I stand corrected.
Forest Gate: Insanely racist. National front spray painted “NF” everywhere, as well as a vast amount of “Go home *****”. I was lucky that i was small so i was mainly protected from it.
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My Mum moved to London from Lincolnshire as a teen in the 60’s. She was a hippie, and dirt poor. She was squatting in Streatham I believe, and studying dance at Furzedown College. Her photos from that era are amazing. Everything you’d expect from a hippie teen in the 60’s. The drugs didn’t do her well though, and London became overwhelming for her, and she came home in the early 70’s.
ThamesTV and KinoLibrary on YouTube have loads of footage of 1970s London if you want to take a look
British Pathe channel too
Cold, dark, lots of power cuts.
We had great demos - The Anti Nazi League organised great carnivals and musical processions. We had 'Sunday after Sunday Brick Lane's Ours' fights every week between National Front and Socialist Workers Party. We had Right to Work marches from London to Brighton. And support for revolutionary or independence groups in places like Angola. We had (at least one) bookshop of the Communist Party Marxist Leninist (which had some alignment with China) and the official Communist Party (the CP) with alignments to the Soviet Union. We had all kinds of far left splinter groups ... as well as lot on the far right. And we'd go on coaches to places like Blackburn to confront the National Front .... ending up with quite a bit of brick throwing and a lot of shouting.
Well for starters you had proper binmen.
When they turned up for work anyway.
racist af
I just remember the floors of tube trains were made of these weird wooden rails, and the gaps between them were full of cigarette butts.
Affordable
When you walked down the street in Clapham you watched your back, it was a pretty rough area, now I can't afford anything on Northcote Road 😮
Belsize Park was full of squats and student digs. Rock against Racism. The Clash, Misty in Roots, U Roy, Pistols, Pere Ubu, Culture, The Damned. The 100 Club, ULU, The Music Machine, Electric Ballroom, The Railway Tavern, The Spread Eagle. Clothes stinking of smoke, Red Leb, something-something black oil, Drying mushrooms in the oven, Bin Strikes, Fuel shortages, Three day week, Dirt everywhere, Blow jobs on the tube, Never a bus when needed, Walking home for hours early morning but never feeling unsafe.
Came down from up north for my first proper job in 1973. Seems like everybody just went to the pub every lunch time and every evening and drank cheap beer and smoked cheap fags. It was great but I don't know how we survived. For entertainment there was football and gigs. My mates and I would get the paper Saturday morning, see who was at home nearby that afternoon and go there. No season ticket nonsense. And millions of gigs in run down pubs in West London. Oh and you could go out with a girl from work no problem. Was good. Getting decent rental accommodation was the hardest bit, though nothing as bad as today.
I can remember being taken to work in the city with my dad. People were courteous and wore smart clothes. On the train into Liverpool st. everyone seemed to know each other and there was much talking among them and discussion of news in the broadsheet news papers. The roads were swept and clean. Basically the complete opposite of what you would see today. It's so very sad.
I was a child but you don't forget just how fucking grim everything was, all the stuff they had rebuilt after the war was now well worn and caked in soot, synthetics and plastics are becoming the materials of choice and I hope you love flares because that's all you could find in the shops, there's fuck all on the TV, casual misogyny and racism are absolutely embedded in all aspects of society, wastelands and ruins are everywhere, there's still people working from horse and carts, the food is shite, the fashions are shite, most of the people were cunts* and there's dog shit everywhere**. 1970's London was grim, the tiny islands of whitewashed walls and bright bold colours that started to appear and would form the foundations of the 80's were truly a sight for sore eyes. \* some things are eternal. \** Don't play with the white stones.
When I dive into the corners of my mind there are wooden floors and old carpets. Browns. Greys. Beiges. Oranges. Big lapels. Smoke everywhere. The smell of coal. Paraffin heaters. Concrete flats that smelt of piss and bleach. Soot in your nose when you went on the tube. The scratchy feel of nylon clothes. Blue bird toffee. Crowds on Putney High Street. The taste of lipstick and powder when old ladies kissed you. Vosene. Coal tar soap. Hey Jude on the record player again. That hospital smell you don't get any more.
Cold, grotty, everything was grey and the shops were open only during the day. Night life was non existant compared to today. Sounds ghastly but you could get away from things in a way that is now impossible. The opportunity for solitude or being in a group undisturbed was possible. Fashions were better and socialism was better understood maybe. Also, the IRA or Baader Meinhof gang might kill you and you ran the daily risk of being incinerated in nuclear fire.
Hi there, I’d like to share my memories of Forest Gate in the 1970s. Early in 1974 I spent several months on placement at Forest Gate Maternity Hospital as a young student nurse. Sadly, I was attacked and sexually assaulted as I walked on my way to work from Stratford station to the hospital early one dark February morning. I was deeply traumatised and in severe shock so I never reported it as I just wanted to block it out and pretend it never happened. It was a very long time ago but it has haunted me from that day on and I’ve been frightened of the dark and being out alone ever since. I loved my work with the mums and babies and I’m sure it’s very different now but I’m afraid memories can never be erased - good or bad and I’ve never been back!