#5fifty5 New window with dubious history

Just as the 196 turns into Wandsworth Road in SW8 via Lansdowne Way, there is a window on a house tucked behind a billboard right opposite the post office collection centre. A window has long fascinated me. It was quite simply the filthiest window I remember seeing in years. That window has now been fixed. You can see the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures below.

The new window is impressive, but knowing what that window was previously like, I could never live there. It would be like getting together with a partner with a dubious past. It might have happened before they met you but that history is going to be a significant hurdle for you to surmount.

As a kid, our back window – the bedroom window – in our bedsit – was significantly rotten for the kids at my secondary school to mock it. The cracked glass was held together by tape, our old rogue landlord refusing to repair it. Whenever I see a dilapidated window, my mind always goes back to that and how the local kids had picked up on it. Much the way I picked up on this window on Wandsworth Road, I suppose.  

I left the family home in the summer of 2000 after a bereavement, leaving 24 years of memories behind, some good, some downright painful. Unlike this window on Wandsworth Road, our window never got repaired. Anyone struck by its disastrous state as they walked past the back of our house would never have guessed just how many people were sleeping in that one room behind that window.