The train was on time and so I decided I would walk to the City. I took the Grays Inn Road down to Holborn and then walked towards St Pauls. A voice at the back of my mind kept telling me there was something significant about the area I was walking through, but it was not until I saw a signpost to St Alban’s church that I realised. This was where my father, who passed away just three years ago, was born and lived until the family were bombed out in the war. Here he is in his own words, as told to my brother a few months before he died: ‘I was born at 10.30am on 22 May 1927 in the Royal Free Hospital, Grays Inn Road, WC1. Home was Bell Court (named after the Bell Pub) in the St. Alban’s Buildings at the front of St. Alban’s Church. It was later renamed Brook’s Court. Bell Court was destroyed when a German land mine fell close by in 1941. Our family lived here in a top floor flat consisting of two rooms. I used to have to pass all the gangs on the way up the stairs. In the living room there was a sink and a gas stove. The rooms were lit by gas mantle (there was no electricity) and this remained the case into the war. There were four apartments on each floor. In the middle were the toilets which were shared. The flats had a flat roof and parapet. The roof accommodated large coppers with a boiler and drying houses. Each family was allocated one day during the week to do their washing. Ironing was undertaken using a flat iron heated on the stove. The children from the nursery school went to church with the older boys and girls. I have a vivid memory of a service one day where the sun was streaming in through the church windows. The air was so thick with incense that it almost made me feel faint. The priest held up the chalice during the service and it looked to me as though he was holding up a baby…’ I turned off the Grays Inn Road and went into the church. There is now an impressive 1966 mural painted behind the altar (see the photograph), but the church is otherwise as my father would have seen it back then in the 1930s. In front of the church stands a modern low-rise development of social housing. It was strange to think that my father had once, as a small boy, lived somewhere up in the air above those houses…