Sadiq Khan was in yesterday’s Mirror offering his opinion on the Tories “plan to transform sink estates“; he speaks of how “having a secure and affordable home meant my parents could build a better life for me…”; this was also my experience.
My mum when widowed January 21 1965, was in the process of moving home, with my dad they’d bought a new bungalow and sold the terraced house they’d lived in for a decade, completing on Saturday 16/01/65. Due to the insurance documents not being signed at the same time, when my dad died of an unknown chronic heart disease on the Thursday, she and I were made homeless.
After two years of ‘making do’ at my grandparents we moved into a maisonette, on a new and at the time, state of the art council estate. Over the past 49 years the same estate has gone from being the flagship for Leicester City Council to so-called sink estate, now surrounded by iron bars. Yet it was that estate where I grew up, went to grammar school and ultimately university and on to post-grad education.