Living next to the gasworks and railway lines – John Buckingham

John Buckingham was born in 1943 in Leyland Avenue – right next door to the gasworks. He remembers his father having an allotment next to the railway line and it being bulldozed over; the digging of the cutting up to the King Offa; riding in the cab of a diesel engine shunting around the gasworks; watching the hill being dug out behind where Homebase is now; and all the wildlife. He remembers how he and his father used to have to go out every Sunday to collect wood for the fire and wishing he could have had some of the coal to keep warm especially in the cold winter of 1947. He also remembers a derailment.

Interview date: 14 December 2011. Interviewer: Sandy Norman.

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