After a break of nearly four years, Kindred Spirits is returning to the Ipswich Star.

Each week David Kindred will be bringing you a selection of vintage photos from the Ipswich area, illustrating the changes in the town.

This week he kicks off with a look at Ipswich’s very own ‘Eastenders’ and a look at the south east of the town.

David Kindred writes....In the 1920s almost 2,000 council houses were built and work continued until the start of the Second World War at Whitton, Rushmere, The Triangle estate off London Road, Gainsborough and Greenwich.

Families, many for the first time, moved into houses with bathrooms, indoor toilets and electric power.

In this, the first of the new series of Kindred Spirits, I have looked through the picture archives at some of the changes to Gainsborough and Greenwich, the home to Ipswich’s “Eastenders”.

The Duke of Gloucester public house in Clapgate Lane, once a thriving heart of the community, closed in 2000. Pipers Vale Swimming Pool was demolished in 1979, Landseer Road School closed in 1987 and the site used for housing with some of the roads named after long serving teachers. It was a good day when in 1970 the last lorry load of rubbish was tipped into the Landseer Road landfill site, which had blighted the area for decades.

Generations on, there are many of the same families living on Gainsborough and Greenwich.

Tell me about life there, then and now, what has changed for the better or worse. Can you add names to the wonderful photographs taken by my colleague Jerry Turner when he visited the Duke of Gloucester with feature writer Dave Allard in May 1974?

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