Living in 1988
I've been digging up some old photographs and they bring back fond memories.
These three are from the flat where we first lived in the East End of London. It belonged to a Housing Association that could not afford to do it up, and so rented a whole staircase to our short-life housing co-op and we sub-letted rooms for £9 per week, which was unbelievable. I met my wife-to-be there and we moved in to this flat together.
The flats had a gas fire and no phones (there were no mobile phones in those days). The bathroom was shared between the whole staircase and lived at the bottom of the stairwell. Somebody tried to get an old piano into their flat and failed to budge it up the stairs, so it was left in the bathroom. The shared basement space became a studio for the artists.
It wasn't all rosy, but it was pretty good. A cool bunch of people, and cheap rent on the outskirts of the centre of London. It doesn't get much better really.
Here's a tune from a band I was enjoying a lot around this time:
