Week 15 class and segregation transcript PDF

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NARRTOR Portland Road, Notting Hill. Full of multimillion-pound houses, it's the ultimate London banker street. But it was once the worst slum in London. GEORGE ANDREWS Portland Road was a slum - as far as other people was concerned. As far as we were concerned, it's where we lived. NARRATOR And today, living on the same street, some of the richest people in Britain - and some of the poorest. HENRY MAYHEW My village is that way. Their village is that way. NARRATOR Houses on Portland Road don't come cheap. In this one you can practically grab both walls with outstretched hands. But it's on the market for just under three million pounds. A few doors down, this derelict shell went for 3.1 million. And this extravagantly decorated house is up for five million. HENRY MAYHEW I'm totally and utterly appalled. It really makes working in other areas fairly pointless. If you can buy the right property, it's pretty pointless going out and doing anything else. But it's a financial ghetto. If you want to live in a ghetto, then there's a limited number of houses you can live in. And this is inside the ghetto. NARRATOR Portland Road was built in the 1850s, in the middle of the most frantic housing boom in London's history. Its houses were put up by speculative developers on a strip of wasteland between the grand, new Ladbroke Estate, which became Notting Hill, and the much more downmarket Norland Estate, home to the Piggeries and Potteries - London's most squalid gypsy camp. Almost everyone rented, rather than bought, and Portland's developers built grand houses, to attract the same posh tenants who were moving into the Ladbroke Estate. At the south end of Portland, the investment paid off. Census returns from the 1860s show the houses being rented to a surgeon, an art dealer, and a fundholder. Booth's map, made around 40 years after Portland was built. At the south end of the street, well-to-do and comfortable residents are living alongside each other. But as you go further north, the class of resident drops dramatically. The people living in this part of the street are poor. The further north you went, the closer you got to the gypsies and the stench of the Piggeries and, up here, the hoped-for posh tenants had failed to materialise. Investors left holding houses on North Portland found that only the poorest wanted to move here - families who couldn't afford more than a single room. Houses built as big family homes slipped into multiple occupancy and a little slum was born. GEORGE ANDREWS

When you look back, we lived in a shack. We lived terrible. Portland Road was a slum, as far as other people was concerned. As far as we were concerned, it's where we lived. We had my mum and dad and six of us kids living in the ground floor, which was only two rooms. We had two people living on the floor above us, and at the top of the house, we had an old soldier from the First World War. And we all shared that same toilet. No bathroom. Tin bath. You fetched it in, put it in front of the fire. The rent was about twelve and six a week, for each family. Twelve and six, by the way, is 65 pence in today's money. They weren't getting two pound rent a week from the house. So they done no repairs, they done nothing. My dad was offered to buy that house for 300 pounds. Number 157, 300 pound. My dad had never seen 300 pound in his life. This is the bit of Portland Road I lived in. 157, we lived there. This is where my granddad lived. My nan and granddad lived in the middle. My uncle there, Uncle Fred, lived there. My Aunt Joan lived right at the very top. My granddad was a rag-and-bone man, and he used to have a barrow outside here. On a Saturday, he'd have all the old clothes, jerseys, shoes. And you could buy a pair of shoes for sixpence. And nobody wore underwear. No boys wore underwear. [WOMAN LAUGHS] Nobody had pants and vests. INTERVIEWER Why not? GEORGE ANDREWS You couldn't afford it! Pants and vests? You're joking! [WOMAN LAUGHS] GEORGE ANDREWS Never had pants and vests. INTERVIEWER You're kidding. GEORGE ANDREWS I am not kidding! We never had pants and vests. The girls, the girls had knickers and things like that. The girls are different, you know? They had to have them. But boys, long trousers or trousers, what do you want pants underneath for? You can save ten bob, you know? [LAUGHTER] INTERVIEWER Do you remember your first pair of pants? GEORGE

Yeah. Well, no, I don't remember them. I don't remember them, but I think I got them from the Red Cross or something. [LAUGHTER] GEORGE I got them from the Red Cross. Yeah, my mum used to go begging, you know? [LAUGHTER] INTERVIEWER Would you say you were working-class people? Is that what you called yourselves? GEORGE ANDREWS Yeah, yeah. Lower working-class. But it didn't worry me. Didn't worry me. Because there were lots of people like me. There was lots of folk like me, you know? See my dad couldn't read or write, nor could his brother, because they never went to school after the age of ten. NARRATOR George's street had fallen dramatically downhill since Booth's time. Just a few years before George was born, one of Booth's researchers came back to Portland Road, to update the original survey. The south end was now occupied entirely by skilled workers. The well-to-do residents from Booth's time had all fled. And at the north end, the road was being dragged further down by a new group settling on the street. GEORGE ANDREWS My other granddad used to live third door from the end, with my gran. They were gypsies, both full-blooded gypsies. That was my mum's family. NARRATOR The north end of Portland Road in about 1935, just a few yards from George's greatgranddad's house. There's an abandoned brewery at the end of the street and tenement houses built for brewery workers. Gypsies and other families from the slum, a few streets to the west, are migrating onto this north end. The slum-dwellers are dragging the street further down, and the 1929 study has a new label for this black end of Portland - 'degraded and semi-criminal'. The slum conditions in some Notting Hill streets had been a national disgrace for a hundred years. And by the Thirties, the housing trust movement had begun to rehouse the district's most destitute. On Portland's north end, both the brewery and many of the tenement houses are about to be demolished, to make way for Portland Road's first social housing block Nottingwood House. Nottingwood is followed by Winterbourne House, a few feet away. The blocks are to provide a new life for the people of the Notting Hill slum. PENNY HICKS We were, I should think, the second, the second or third of the settlers. TIM HICKS We were living in Chelsea with too many children, and a tiny house, and we were desperately wanting to find a bigger house, and we wandered down here. And we thought it

was quite a good place, Portland Road. Because you come off Holland Park Avenue, which has always been fairly pleasant, and then go into grotland, which it was in those days....