Demetra Charalambous with her daughter Yioda 

AT just 14, a young girl from Cyprus started working at a hairdressers in Brecknock Road, earning only £1 a week to help do up traditional hair sets of the 1960s and place customers under drying hoods.

Now, 61 years later, Demetra Charalambous is celebrating 50 years of running her own salon at the very same address.

Demetra Hair, at 7 Brecknock Road, is one of the longest-standing businesses in the street, with a hairdressers having occupied the premises since at least the 1930s.

Ms Charalambous started working as a Saturday girl before becoming a full-time hairdresser aged 16. At 25, she took over the lease from her former boss and has been running the business ever since.

“I don’t know where all the years have gone, it’s gone so quick. I loved it all the way,” she said. “People are really friendly and we find that we serve generations of families – someone’s grandma, then their mum, now their grandchild.”

Ms Charalambous was born in 1951 in the small village of Astromeritis, Cyprus. Her father first came to the UK on his own and Demetra, her mother Maria and brother followed later.

Photographs of Demetra on the wall of her salon in Brecknock Road

The family settled at 352 Camden Road and Ms Charalambous attended Hungerford Primary School.

“I used to cry on the way to school, it was very hard to make friends for a while as I didn’t know English,” she said. “Camden was such a big place, and was very different from our small village where my mum used to work in the fields.”

When she was 14, she got a Saturday job at the Brecknock Road salon, which was run by Michael Schmit and his wife Dawn. They put Ms Charalambous through training at Vidal Sassoon and aged 16 she was working full-time.

After 11 years, she took over the lease and five decades later the salon remains a family business with her daughter Yioda joining the salon aged 21.

Yioda said: “We have been very blessed with a loyal clientele. Mum still has a client that used to go to my mum’s boss, she is 85.

“I always enjoyed coming here over half-terms and watching and listening to conversations.

“It felt like I had inherited hundreds of aunties. I think what I liked was how I met different people from different walks of life, hearing real-life stories all the time.

“Being around a lot of women, it was very inspiring meeting different women from different cultures and backgrounds.”

Ms Charalambous added: “I just love making people feel good. If they are having a bad day they can come in, get their hair done and just feel that little bit better after. That’s what I love.

“I feel very honoured to have been here for 50 years. But our clients made it for us.

“It’s having nice people coming in that makes it all worth it.”