No large families

One of the major changes in more recent years was the conversion of some three-bedroom houses to two-bedroom dwellings. It was wrong, Geordie, insists.

‘One guy is supposed to have said that ‘there are no large families now’. So they were in effect birth-control people as well as housing control.

This here is a four-bedroom house. It was formerly three. I wouldn’t have allowed them to reduce the number of bedrooms. People signed up for three-bedroom houses (or four!) and they were breaking all the rules and regulations to reduce that number. If a tenant had stopped the builders getting in, that would have been the end of it!’

When Geordie first moved to The Meadow with his wife Teresa in 1950 it was supposed to be a temporary move.

Canal Street was unsuitable for rearing a family. Fishers coal lorries were continually passing the door on the way to Portadown and when my kids opened the door they were straight out and nearly under the wheels of those lorries. 64 Canal Street was going to be renovated and I moved over here for the duration of the work.

‘Sure, I’m still only here temporarily’, he quipped!

But things were starting to improve in the early 50s. When we came out here first I had

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.