We'd a lot of fun in those tumbledown days. Hippies playing at being parish priests. - Personal Copy is Ray Gosling's memoir of the 1950s. He writes about building and losing a youth centre in Leicester, trying to do things differently before retreating, bruised, to Nottingham. He made his name there fighting to save the best houses and demolish the worst of the St Anns slums, which were home to 30,000 people, 300 shops and 50 pubs. Along the way he wrote pamphlets for the Fabians, stood for election (Vote for a madman) and was involved with many figures from the 1960s including his hero Colin MacInnes. His memoir captures the mood - or rather the moods of the time; pill popping; tribal Labouir voting; class divided Britain; home to a new generation of immigrants with their blues clubs. He writes of the cafes, pubs and life on the streets. Speakers' Corner, the Sally Bash and the Communists in the Square on Sundays, crumbling Victorian mansions, overcrowding, allotments, the new art gallery, the backstreet lesbian bars...
