June was a child on the Boundary Street Estate during the Second World War. Her father, Archie Guiver (1909-2007), was the local ARP warden, and in 1939 he put together the amazing hand-drawn map (below) of the streets immediately to the south of the Estate, to help him on his patrols. June wrote to me that “it is a pretty unique record because many of the buildings shown here were razed to the ground during the Blitz. We children used the bombed sites as our playgrounds.”

It is a fantastic memorial of the local businesses and shops, and also shows where all the much-needed fire hydrants were located. The cabinet-making and other woodworking trades (which had been a feature of the Old Nichol since the late 17th century) are also still very much in evidence at this date; and Vavasseur’s silk manufactory, significant in the life of the Nichol, was still in business, at the corner of Swanfield Street and Old Nichol Street, to where the London County Council had relocated it when the Nichol was demolished.

June, above, and her father, Archie, below, in Sicily during World War II.

June has stayed in contact with childhood friends from Bethnal Green: “Some of us Golden Oldies who grew up on the Estate during the 1940s often share memories of what we all consider to have been one of the happiest times of our lives. On the estate, we were a mixed bunch of Christians and Jews, and none of us can remember prejudice of any kind. Neighbours always looked out for us kids, especially if fathers were away during the war.

“We never went hungry, and if I came home from school and my mother wasn’t in, one of the neighbours would make sure that I had a piece of bread pudding or cheesecake to keep me going. My Catholic friend’s mother made lockshen soup because she’d been taught to cook by Jewish neighbours. We bought our bread from Kossoff’s in Calvert Avenue, and from Zaggers and Schacters in Redchurch Street.

“My maternal grandmother, Ellen Golding, was born in 1879 at 5 Vincent Street in the Old Nichol and was baptised in the ‘church in a stable’.” (Pictured below is that very church: Holy Trinity Shoreditch was sited in a loft above a stable in Old Nichol Street until 1887, and the building of a magnificent new church. This new Holy Trinity would itself be destroyed in the Blitz of May 1941.)

“There were also Goldings at 56 Old Nichol Street at that time. My grandmother and her parents didn’t stay long in the Old Nichol, though, because within two years they were living at the other end of Bethnal Green – and there they stayed. But my grandmother often visited us when we were living in Abingdon Buildings on the estate: we were quite unaware at that time that she had been born just a few hundred yards away.

“We lived at Abingdon until I was twelve, except for a couple of months during World War II. My father arranged for my mother, sister and I to go to Devon after a particularly bad air-raid, when we fled to the crypt of St Leonard’s church. My father carried me, and my mother carried my sister, Joan, and everywhere around us seemed to be on fire. However, when my father went abroad with the Royal Artillery, my mother decided that home was best. Some of the ground-floor flats on the estate were fortified as air-raid shelters but they were rarely used. Dad fought in the Middle East, Sicily and Italy. Years earlier, he’d fought at the battle of Cable Street, to prevent Moseley and his fascists marching through the East End.

“When my father moved us to a house in the ‘green and pleasant suburb’ of Chingford, my mother, sister and I hated it: we felt like fish out of water. At Abingdon Buildings, we had been surrounded by friends and family in an atmosphere of love and warmth.”

Above: June (left) with her mother, Ellen Guiver, née Downes, and sister, Joan.
Below: Ellen Golding (far left), born in the Old Nichol in 1879; (far right) her daughter Ellen, with June and Joan, photographed outside Abingdon Buildings on the Boundary Street Estate in 1943.