Pic 1: Peggy Goodwin back at her old flat at Camelot

Pic 2: Camelot House and its courtyard as it now looks

Published: 26 July, 2012
by ALICE HUTTON

THE Queen’s coronation, June 2, 1953. In Westminster Abbey Elizabeth II is covered in ermine and jewels and seated regally next to Prince Philip.
At the same time schoolchildren Joe Hughes and Peggy Goodwin stand in a concrete courtyard proudly wearing handmade paper and foil crowns as the “King and Queen” of Camelot House, Camden Town.

Nearly 60 years later it is not just the Diamond Jubilee but the reunion of “the Camelot kids” – dozens of children who grew up during the 1940s and 1950s in the “golden age” of a very special housing estate in Camden.

Clutching a photo of herself aged 16 during her “coronation”, Peggy, now a 75-year-old grandmother and still living in Camden, stands outside the flat where she grew up for the first time in 40 years.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, touching the door of No 30 as its puzzled current occupants look on. She beams with delight pointing out the homes of neighbours long gone, games played and teas eaten, evoking memories of an idyllic Enid Blyton childhood.

“Camelot was a wonderful place,” Peggy sighs. “Filled with community spirit. Everybody knew everybody else and looked after you. I have never seen anything like it again.”

Built in 1939, a year before the bombs started falling on London during the Second World War, there were around 95 flats encasing a large courtyard off Camden Park Road which reverberated from morning until dusk with the sounds of children playing.

Long, thin, balcony corridors were filled with clean washing hung out to dry and the floors were kept spotless by a constant rota of mums who swept and scrubbed them with pride.

The homes were considered state-of-the-art, with indoor bathrooms but no central heating, and, during the winter, ice would coat the inside as well as the outside of windows.

During the Second World War, when air-raid sirens sounded heralding the arrival of aerial bomb attacks over the capital, Camelot families would dash in their dressing gowns to hunker down together in bicycle sheds in the centre of the courtyard.

Parents, often working back-to-back shifts during the Blitz, would take it in turns to pool together their money and hire buses to take their giant brood on special day trip “treats” out of London.

And when VE Day came in 1945 they held a mass street party with homemade posters claiming it was a “Camelot victory”.

“To us it was heaven,” said Valerie Austin (nee Drummond), a 67-year-old mother-of-four living in Essex who grew up at Camelot with her sister and three brothers.

"I really hope that as many of the Camelot kids as possible will turn up to the reunion and share all those incredible memories.

“It was a golden age growing up there and like having 100 brothers and sisters all brought up together. The childhood we had was magical. It was a lost time really.

“Looking back, it may have been a block of flats, but it was our castle.”

• The reunion will take place on Saturday, September 8 at The Lord Stanley Public House from 1pm.
For more information call Valerie Austin on 07805 825684.