Housing

I was born in the Overgate in 1957, from there we moved to Shepherds Loan. My first school was Hawkhill. We moved again to Macalpine Road then to Kincardine Street, our next move was to St. Fillans Road. When I was 12 we moved to Wallsend Newcastle.

My family moved to Carnegie Tower in November 1967, when I was 10. Carnegie Tower was the first of the 4 tower blocks to be built in Alexander Street. Previously in that area, there had been streets full of old small shops and tenements where families lived, mainly in cramped conditions and sharing outside toilets with neighbours. I was an only child and we had lived only a few hundred yards away in a one bedroomed first floor tenement flat at 76 James Street. Read more......

I've just came across this site by accident and its wonderful to read old  stories and look at old photos of Dundee. I was born at the foot of the  Hulltoon (as it was known) in Sheperd's Pend (46 Hilltown), when I was 4 we swapped houses with my Grannie to 20 Hulltoon. They called it Meekie Land I went to St Mary's Forebank and St John's schools growing up 1944 to 1959. They were great days.
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I recall getting off the bus at Kings Cross Road and walking along Dronley Place when suddenly there was a massive gas explosion behind me.

One of the tenements in Kings Cross Road had the front blown off. I felt like I had just experienced an earthquake as I walked home that day. It must have been about 1975 or slightly earlier.

I stayed in a house like the one displayed in the Bygone Memories exhibition, in Central Library, right before I got married, going back 40 years. But now I am a widow, I do remember the good days I had there. Little shop on the corner where you went and got all your messages. I stayed at 14 Lyon Steet, all in the past now.

Immediately after the Second World War my Aunt lived in a tenement exactly like the model on display at the Central Library, Dundee. It had been an abandoned building, a “backland” in Nelson Street, but such was the need for more housing after the war that this and other buildings like it were hastily done up for homeless people. Read more......

We lived in tenement at the bottom of Blackness Road / Brook Street. Only gas, no electricity and the loo was on the landing, my mother having to clean her part of the stairs, and as Billy Connolly would say we used an old army greatcoat as an eiderdown. Then the exciting time of moving to St Mary's to a three bedroom house with garden and a great treat of having a loo and bath indoors. Even though I was only 2/3 I remember the journey in the back of a removal van from our old tenement to our new home. Great days, I wish I could rewind and go back to those days (time move on). Read more......

I was born in 1932 in Dundee Royal Infirmary. My first school was Ancrum Road School but I cannot remember much about it. As my parents were both English we had to live in lodgings until the start of the Second World War. We eventually got an upstairs three roomed house at Pitkerro Drive. There were four houses in the block. I learned to cycle through the leggy as we called [it] on my father's bike. Read more......

I remember living (squatting) at 13 Larch Street in the nine storey tenement and attending Blackness School prior to moving to Fintry in 1951, and moving to Linlathen Primary just over the Linlathen bridge. I'm sure it was a foundry opposite us on Larch Street, and a huge open midden around the corner on Urquhart Street. A penny dainty from the corner shop on the way to school was a treat to look forward to.