Free Up West by Pip Granger

ear.’
    It was not just that people were worried about finding somewhere else to live. The tenement buildings themselves inspired a great deal of love, as Sonia Boulter testified. ‘Newport Buildings was a tenement building but I loved it. I sobbed my heart out when I left. I didn’t move out of there until I was thirty-one, when they pulled it down. I didn’t want to move. My parents were born there, my brothers were all born there, and so was I, in 1940. Actually in the Buildings.’
    Ann Lee, who lived in the Wild Street Peabody Buildings, also remembers how living close to one another fostered a feeling of togetherness. ‘The Buildings were a very close-knit community. There were eleven blocks all together – J and K block got bombed during the war – and about twenty-five flats in each. Some were one bedroom, some were two. Some were what they called a bedsit, just one room, set in the middle of the landing.’
    For some, the sense of community was not simply a matter of living cheek by jowl; it was a family affair. ‘Everybody in the Bedfordbury had big families,’ remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘I come from a family of five. My uncle who lived below us had seven kids. I had three other lots of aunts and uncles living in Bedfordbury. They all had more than three. Five or six wasn’t unusual. Another aunt lived in the other buildings, in Wild Street. When my brother got married, he got a flat in Wild Street. I was offered one, but didn’t take it, I stayed in Bedfordbury.’ All five of the Mann children slept in bunk beds in a single room when they were young; as they got older, the family was moved down from 12E on the second floor to 5E on the first floor, and a rare three-bedroom flat.
    The way the tenements were set up meant that people more or less had to get on with their neighbours. Sharing was a way of life. Ronnie Mann again: ‘There was five flats to a landing, you had toilets at the end. You literally just had your rooms: three rooms for the seven of us. There was the coal box as you come in on the right, in a little alcove, then thethree rooms in a row, no corridor. In the living room was the gas cooker and a coal fire, and a fire in the other two rooms. No inside toilet. The man in the middle of the landing, the three living next door to me and us seven made eleven – we all used one toilet, and shared a cold water butler sink, where you could fill up your kettle or whatever. There was no running water in the flat. Laundry was done by hand in a wash house, where every flat had one day a week. That was all you had, it was as simple as that. You just got on with it.’
    Some of the local flats were particularly run-down. An LCC block on Macklin Street had a reputation for being a bit rough, and some of those in private ownership, such as the Bells at the bottom of Drury Lane, were positively decrepit. The Jackson family had been moved from Shorts Gardens in Covent Garden to rather more salubrious surroundings in Bloomsbury following intervention by the Luftwaffe, but Olga Jackson and her much younger brother Graham still remember visiting their gran in her flat in Crown Court, at the back of Bow Street police station. There were three tenement blocks there, named after theatrical types – Sheridan, Beaumont and Fletcher Buildings – ‘where the front door would come out on to the balcony, and you’d go in and you’d step straight in to the living area, like a bedroom-cum-everything. There was a little scullery out the back, with a toilet, where a policeman used to watch Gran undress. I thought they would have had better things to do than watch her undress.’
    Peter Jenkins’s father’s duties included the collection ofrents and the management of a team of porters, who were all residents and worked for very little money, as they had their flats in lieu. They fetched and carried, looked after the general upkeep of the