St Stephens Church

A Memory of West Ham.

My paternal grandparents lived at number 29 St. Stephen's Road from about 1906 until 1944. My father and his two sisters were born in West Ham and he lived at number 29 until he married in 1934 and moved to the south side of the Thames. As a young boy he was in the choir at St. Stephen's Church. My great-aunt and her family lived at number 27 and my uncle purchased his first house in the same street, I think in the late 1920s, so the family was well established in the area for a number of years.
My dad moved to Croydon when he married and all of his generation except one moved away from West Ham.
I vaguely remember being taken to visit my grandparents in 1939 but never went there again as the war intervened and by not long after my grandparents died.
As I recall, my dad said the house had no bathroom. Must have been a real challenge for the family with five children.
I never went back to see the house in later years but did find a picture on Google Earth. Apparently it survived the war but not the church on the corner. It was apparently bombed and never rebuilt.
After my dad returned from overseas in 1946 there was no reason to go back as his parents were dead by then. I suspect he may have made a a visit by himself to see what had survived the war and no doubt like many returning servicemen was very sad that the neighborhood of his youth had been damaged so badly and there must at that time been many empty bomb sites all over.
I was born in Croydon so do not personally identify with West Ham but have always been curious how life must have been in my dad's time.