My mother and father moved into the house in the Portwey when I was less than one year old so the details of the move are unknown to me, but there are certain happenings and times that stick are in my mind and small recollected incidents which I remember… but not necessarily in the right sequence.
The Portwey when we moved was a dead end street and part of the proposed outer ring road around Leicester which would take the traffic out of the centre of the city. It was never completed but remnants of it remain: Broad Avenue, The Portwey and Doncaster Road. We were the last house in the road and from the front we looked across fields to the asylum (The Towers Hospital). In the rear garden we faced a meadow going up a slight rise and over to, then right across the fields, we could see the end of Overton Road and the end of Tailby Avenue.
To simplify house building the house was unique in that it was an experiment in unit construction; the forerunner of pre-fabricated houses developed after the second world war. It was thought that these could be the answer to the housing shortage. It was constructed entirely of steel panels, with the roof and walls and panelled on the inside with sheet asbestos held in place with wooden battens. It stood on a concrete raft/plinth to which the panels were bolted at roughly one foot intervals. The panels were of a standard size, flange on all edges, the flanges drilled at fixed intervals to take bolts which fixed it to the ground and also fixed the panels together. At ceiling height a broad steel band ran round the house and steel strips ran from side to side, and to these were fixed the joists for the bedroom floors. Another row of steel panels were the put round at first floor level which then reached roof level, again constructed of steel square panels with a steel chimney breast, lined with brick from top to bottom.
The interior of the house and the fittings I suppose were the height of development at that time. In the front room was a large range which supplied hot water. After six months the cooking range was found to be inefficient and was replaced. We had electric lighting, a separate bathroom built into the corner of the kitchen with running hot water from a back boiler, supplying hot water over the sink as well as for the bath. All the ceilings were done with square asbestos panels. There was an outside flush toilet and a coal house (both in the entrance porch for the back door). Window frames were made of steel and the panels below the windows outside and in were made half height of the standard panel. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, two with coal fires. The greatest problem was condensation and in winter the walls were often wet through. This never seemed to have any serious effect on living or on health; it was just a nuisance. The house was a good idea in conception but had snags in practice.
Living in a street that was a dead end and having the Brook and fields at the end of the road made it possible for children of all ages, even very young, to use the street as a playground. Another advantage was the width of the road, being an unused dual carriageway space was not at a premium. It was lit by gaslights down the centre and had rows of trees both sides and a double line of trees down the centre to aid as goal posts, home bases and cricket stumps for the boys; for the girls, skipping ropes were tied to them to act as high jumps and the centre island acted as a good tennis court middle. All the families that lived there at that time were approximately the same age with children of around the same age as myself up to the age of my sister.
The city boundary was the Uppingham Road turn where Scraptoft Lane branched off. From there on it was all country; every road and lane led to destinations well-known to the children, but more of those later.
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