Bolton Road Houses

The original boundary walls outside the houses are castellated - the intention was to have railing in the gaps but as war broke out metal was precious and the railings were not installed, and the walls were redesigned

early photo of Bolton Road house

Some houses were left as a shell, unfinished, until after the war.

The Bolton Road houses had an integral vacuum system: a brass socket for fixing a hose in each room sucked dirt to a central suction box under the stairs. Over the years it became impossible to obtain parts and the systems became obsolete. Strangely I saw a similar system at the Ideal Home Exhibition in the 1980s advertised as an innovation but I had grown up fascinated by one that was invented in the 1930s !

In about 1940-41 the council discovered that Bolton Road had been numbered from the wrong end, so every house was renumbered. My grandparents were right in the middle and swapped numbers, headed stationery and misdirected mail with their next-door neighbours (41 became 39). People at either end of the road had a far greater change in number.

The house agents' sales office for the Bolton Road estate was a small wooden chalet, opposite Salmon's Road, complete with indoor toilet . After all the houses were sold, one of the staff rented it to live in and later bought it, renovated and extended it to become a house.

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