Mile Cross Pioneers and The ‘Wooden Slums’

During the research phase of the recent Mile Cross 100 project one of the little details we were hoping to find out was who were the first people to move into a Mile Cross home on the new estate, however, I wasn’t surprised to learn that we couldn’t figure out exactly who those very first tenants were. I mean, we had some names of people who were here in the beginning, but it was nigh-on impossible to pin down any one person or family that were given the very first set of keys here in Mile Cross, which was a bit of a shame. We knew that people started moving in to some of the first purpose-built Council-owned homes in around 1923, at around the same time, or not long after the new bridge at Mile Cross was opened in September of the same year. By using the Kelly’s Directories (Heritage Centre, top floor, Forum) of the time I did manage to build a fairly accurate map of which streets were inhabited, and in which years. For example, at the start of 1924 there were people already living at Bolingbroke Road, Chambers Road, Civic Gardens, Losinga Crescent, Marshall Road and Rye Avenue, but not all of those roads were yet fully inhabited, or indeed completed at this point. People were effectively moving into a building site, and this theme continued on for about seven years.

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