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Bongrace Walk, LUTON, LU4 8FT

This was built as a detached house and shop, one of a pair at the corners of Chandos Road, foreground. It first appears on an OS map of 1938. My father worked here, then took on the business when the old pharmacist, Mr Prosser, retired. We lived here from around 1950. My bedroom was at the near corner. The far window facing Dunstable Road, right, was a stockroom. My parents must have had the bedroom with the bow window. There was a bathroom over the kitchen in the far back corner. The lounge downstairs had a coal fire and a bow window but it looks as though the pharmacy has since been extended back into the ground floor, leaving a flat upstairs. There was a back garden and a garage, soon occupied when my father bought a Vauxhall saloon (presumably made in Luton). The photo was taken about ten minutes after a spectacular road accident. The driver of the van, right, had lost control, hit a car in Dunstable Road then ploughed into cars parked on the kerb and the forecourt. No-one was injured as far as I know but ten vehicles were damaged. That belonging to Mr Bhavash, the current pharmacist, was also completely blocked in. This was on my first visit to Luton since we moved away in 1953.

This was built as a detached house and shop, one of a pair at the corners of Chandos Road, centre. It first appears on an OS map of 1938. My father worked here, then took on the business when the old pharmacist, Mr Prosser, retired. We lived here from around 1950. See Image The busy Dunstable Road A505 connects with the M1 to the west at Junction 11. The photo was taken about thirty minutes after a spectacular road accident. The driver of the van lost control, hit a car in Dunstable Road then ploughed into cars parked on the kerb and the forecourt. No-one was injured as far as I know but ten vehicles were damaged. That belonging to Mr Bhavash, the current pharmacist, was also completely blocked in. This was on my first visit to Luton since we moved away in 1953.

This is the second house I lived in at Luton from around 1948 until we moved to Torquay in 1953. Then it was a detached house and pharmacy on the corner of Chandos Road, foreground. There was a clinic opposite in Dunstable Road; to the north was what I faintly recall as a new housing estate which my parents called Leagrave, all suggesting a planned suburb from the late 1930s or immediately postwar. I remember the house as a pebble-dashed cube. My father's pharmacy was not a deep shop – perhaps extending back only as far as the long downpipe. Now, not only has the pharmacy extended forward but, judging by the bricked-up downstairs bay window (to the lounge), also back into the ground floor, leaving a flat upstairs. In 1948 this was a modern house: it had a light roomy bathroom, a kitchen with gas and electricity although we burnt coal (my mother insisted on anthracite) in an open fireplace in the lounge. There was a garden and a garage, soon occupied by a bronze-effect Vauxhall saloon, doubtless made in Luton, like me. My visit was preceded by a spectacular road accident: the driver of a large van lost control and ended up on the forecourt, causing damage to ten other vehicles: hence all the cars in view and several people standing about doing things on their phones.

At the Waller Avenue/Dunstable Road junction, in Leagrave.

This road runs along the railway line on the right.

Dunstable Court consisted of three blocks of six flats each. No 13 is omitted. They first appeared on an OS map of 1938 and one of them was my first home from 1944. The view was across a recreation ground to the steaming, smoking Laporte chemical works in the valley. Everything in nearby streets was stained orange.