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.
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.
To simplify house building this particular pair of houses (No. 22 and ours, No. 24) were unique in that they were 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.
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