Our Street is the perfect companion to Gilda O'Neill's bestselling My East End. This book focuses on the lives of Londoners in the East End during the Second World War. Showing the concerns, hopes and fears of these so-called 'ordinary people' Our Street illustrates these times by looking at the every day rituals which marked the patterns of daily life during WWII. It is an important book and also an affectionate record of an often fondly remembered, more communal, way of life that has all but disappeared.
At first sight of Our Street, the old publishing maxim 'if they like it once they'll love it twice' comes to mind as it might initially seem little different from My East End, Gilda O'Neill's bestselling social history of the area in which she grew up which achieved a 24,500 hardback and 110,000 paperback sale. However, this affectionate, nostalgic record of East End life during World War II is a very different book which focuses on veteran Cockneys who tell their sometimes funny, sometimes hopeful and often shocking stories of what it was really like living through the Blitz. Through these oral testimonies O'Neill paints a picture of a tightly knit community of extended families, life-long friends and close neighbours that sadly no longer exists in our big cities. Show more
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