The Button Girls, The Telephone Girls and The Picture House Girls by Patricia McBride are out today! Shop the Lily Baker series here.๐งก
People often ask me what inspires my books, andย The Picture House Girls was inspired by real events that occurred in Cutteslowe (a suburb of Oxford).
In 1934, Clive Saxton built two streets. One half of each street had larger โprivateโ houses, the other half had corporation houses. Worried his private houses wouldnโt sell if the owners feared the โslum dwellersโ would walk past them, he built 7′ high walls across the roads, each topped with vicious metal spikes. The seven-foot barricades carved jagged lines through the heart of Cutteslowe.
Corporation dwellers gazed in horror at the wall when they were being built. The elderly, the infirm, mums with prams, everyone, would have to walk much further to the shops and bus stops. The walls represented the unjust barriers of a class divide.
Abe Lazarus, a communist politician, took up their cause. Using a variety of campaigns involving local residents he kept pressuring Saxton to remove the walls. But Saxton wasnโt listening. In 1938 the local council demolished the walls only to find the roads themselves were owned by Saxton.ย
The walls were rebuilt.
During WW2 a tank drove through them.ย
The walls were rebuilt.
The War Office paid for it.
It seemed as if they would be there forever, a symbol of a fractured suburb. But despite the constant knockbacks the residents tirelessly continued their campaign. The gruelling fight lasted twenty-five years. When the walls finally fell in 1959, residents erupted into jubilation, celebrating the triumphant unification of their community. Children, who had never seen the other end of the roads were the first to cross the fallen bricks.ย
There is a blue plaque commemorating where one of the walls was and the spikes from the top are in the Museum of Oxford.
My husband comes from Oxford and told me this story. Immediately my mind went to a โCinderellaโ theme. Lily, a girl from the poor end of the road and Edward, an army officer from the private end. Their differences and the war threaten to keep them apart. Will they be able to overcome them to enjoy their life together?
