Title
Memories of council housing at Eyres Monsell, leicester
Subject
Housing
Description
Dorothy Oliver and Brenda & Ron Brewster talks about moving into council housing on the Eyres Monsell estate in the 1950s.
Creator
East Midlands Oral History Archive
Source
Interview with Dorothy Oliver and Brenda & Ron Brewster by the East Midlands Oral History Archive. Uncatalogued.
Publisher
East Midlands Oral History Archive
Date
1950s
Rights
Dorothy Oliver and Brenda & Ron Brewster
Language
English
Original Format
.wav
Duration
2 min
Bit Rate/Frequency
128 kbps
Transcription
When we moved into the Eyres Monsell we hadn’t got any money at all. The first thing we bought was a bedroom suite wasn’t it? And we bought that from - Wigfalls – I bought mine from Wigfalls – we bought it from that shop where I used to meet you on the clock tower – Phillips? – Phillips, yeah that’s right – we bought it from Phillips. Downstairs all we’d got was two armchairs and a rug, there was nothing else. We were glad that we’d even got a bathroom, because we’d never had a bathroom in anywhere we’d lived. It was just, you know, a really big luxury to have a bathroom – it was a brand spanking new house, no one else had lived it – we were the first people to live in it. There was no paths, no footpaths, no paths – no fencing – no fencing, the gardens hadn’t been allotted out, and it was freezing, freezing cold wasn’t it? But the nice thing was we had running hot water, because the water was warmed from the back boiler that was in – when you lit your fire – back boiler – you had a back boiler in it – it heated the water, and it was just luxury, you know, to have all that. ‘Cos we’d never had any of that, we just… to have hot running water and a bathroom was just sheer bliss. Like I say, they came and they put the roads in and they put the gardens in. The nice thing was that all the people that were moving in, we were all in the same boat. Everybody had got a child, because you couldn’t have a council house without a child anyway, and everybody had got the same standards, everybody looked after each other and it was just really nice, it was really nice up there.
Interviewer
Jenny Escritt
Interviewee
Dorothy Oliver and Brenda & Ron Brewster
Location
Home address of Dorothy Oliver
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