Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through the recorded memories of the area’s older residents. Jim Noble was born in 1914 and was interviewed in 1994.

I was born in Park Street and looking back over the years, Kendal has changed a great deal.

It used to pride itself as the Old Grey Town, which was due to the limestone buildings from quarries round the town. Now concrete has got itself well into the middle of us. However, the town has not completely lost its character.

Apart from the town centres round Fellside, Kirkland and Longpool there was very little housing in my young days outside that perimeter.

The first council houses to be built in Kendal were built in 1919 and now we call it Castle Grove and that is why Castle Grove still has a greater charm as a housing estate than probably any other in Kendal.

The estate was built something on the design of Welwyn Garden City and that is why the houses, laid out in circles and rectangles, and the trees and open spaces, has made the housing estate out of character with all the modern brick development which has taken over the town.

It is not surprising that those who live on that estate, particularly on the Castle side, hold on to their houses very much because nowhere in the town will they get a more delightful view and pretty certain nobody will build in front of them.

Down the south of the town there were hardly any houses beyond Romney Bridge. There was a house on the corner at the end of Natland Road and five houses down Natland Road.

Out on Milnthorpe Road there was only Stonecross. Apart from that there was a big house at Hawesmead where the Clerk to the county council, Mr H.B. Greenwood, used to live. The house was pulled down and then they built modern houses all in that area.