The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 39 ............ a garden shed a story

The story of one house in Peckham over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

Now I don’t usually do then and now stories but the tale of our shed has something more than just a building at the bottom of a garden in Lausanne Road.

For a start it has survived sixty years and while I remember it being built in 1955 I had no idea that it would still be there in 2015.

But it was which was a testament to the skill of the Polish lodger who lived at the top of our house and undertook to build it as a thank you.

He had arrived in Britain at the end of the war, and got to know the East German woman who lived the floor below and bit by that friendship blossomed and they were married, eventually moving out to a flat in the yard of Evans Cook on Queens Road.

They were part of that huge displaced population made refugees by the war.  Some were returning home having been uprooted by the Nazis others fleeing what they thought was the vengeance of the advancing Soviet army.

And somehow our couple had found their way to Lausanne Road.

I still think of them, remembering the real coffee and little Polish biscuits they served up.

And on a summer’s day when we were invited back into our old house forty three years after we left there it still was.

Not only that but lurking away to the right was the old Health Centre, which of course is a story for another time along with Evans Cook Close.

Pictures; the garden shed at the bottom of our garden, circa 1955, and 2007 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road