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night. It was horrible, they were friends of mine, who would come down and say let’s go Paki bashing, it was upsetting.
Another change which came to Luton but I’m unsure of when is the introduction of Halal meat. With rising Muslims
came the Muslim butcher shops, I assume this was around the 80s.

Video Testimony - Robert Roche

I lived on Ivy Road, I lived there from my birth until we left
Bury Park in 1969. The house was originally owned by my great
grandparents, at the turn of the last century, when there
was still a farm on Kenilworth Road. My great grandmother
described how the cows used to stick their heads over the
fence at the end of the garden, there’s still reminiscence of Bury
Farm there. Bury Park was very much working class, I can only
talk about Ivy Road, everybody knew everybody else. Most
families have grown up there. Children had moved back in other
houses down the road, so it was just a family road.
On Dunstable Road, we had every type of shop we wanted, we
didn’t need to go into town centre. We had small supermarkets,
cobblers, even down to candle stick makers, it was a very busy
area. Dunstable road, before Hatters Way or the busway was
built, was a very busy road, because it was the link between
Luton and Dunstable. There were lots of buses passing, it was
actually a dangerous road. There weren’t many crossing places
and there were accidents.

On Dunstable Road, we had every If you look at Bury Park now, the make-up of the shopping
type of shop we wanted, we didn’t area has changed a lot. Lots of different shops have opened up
need to go into town centre. there. Even though you may not be able to get everything from
Bury Park the area has a significant number of shops. It is still
very bustling with traffic which has been slowed down now.

I recall walking around the area, we used to go off for days, there were no telephones, I think only 3 or 4 people on the
road had a telephone, nobody had mobile phones. We used to be sent out early in the morning and told not to come
back until later in the evening, so we made our own fun as it were. We used to go up to Dallow Road and spend hours
up there. We didn’t spend much time in the shops in Bury Park.

One of the things we did on bonfire night, was to make a Guy and we used to stand it on front of a shop and say
‘penny for the Guy.’ People used to give us money, depending on how good the guy was and was going to be burnt
later that evening. I was always sent every Thursday with a huge brown bag that my mother had made out of some
material, to pick up the shopping that had been ordered by her. It was always full of tins, it used to bang on my leg, and
it was very heavy, but that was my job and I had to do it.

The main thing for me is the football ground in the Bury Park area as me and my grandfather along with his father used
to go to visit the pitch, now I go there with my son. So there are six generations of us with memories of the football
club. I recall how the roads would fill up with traffic and cars on a match day. In the 1960s the authorities decided to
bring in parking restrictions, and more roads were made one way. They wanted to limit the cars, as all the roads around
are very narrow.

There were no pubs in Bury Park because the original land was owned by Quakers, and they put codes in the deed that
no alcohol should be sold alongside any of the houses. The only place you could get alcohol was the Bobber’s stand,
which was part of the football ground. It wasn’t particularly busy in there, other than match days. I was a member and I
used to go there. The first pub I remember was the Conway Arms, on Leagrave Road and on Westside Centre, when the
Westside Centre was built.

The gas was there from my childhood, the smell of coke emitting from it, wafted all the way over Bury Park. The
London smokes also used to hit Luton as well, I remember going to school with a scarf wrapped around my mouth and
you could hardly see more than a couple of feet in front of you. The yellow and sticky smoke used to hit Luton and sit
in the valley. It used to sit for days on end and used to smell, so Bury Park used to have a smell.

The shops in Bury Park are specialist, mostly owned by Asians, because religion prohibits alcohol, there is no reason to
have any alcohol in Bury Park which is fine. The shops sell specialist things such as sweets that you don’t get anywhere
else in Luton. I often go back to Bury Park to buy things. When I lived in Newmarket, Asian sweets were a delicacy, I
used to take them back and show them. Those days, you couldn’t get Asian sweets in Suffolk.

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