David Fletcher Available to Purchase

Tom Bradley has never lived in a house with a bathroom. Born and bred in the Lancashire mill town of Accrington, he lives in the two‐up and two‐down type of terraced house spawned in their thousands across the face of Northern England in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The stone‐built house, one of the scores clustered round a former mill, now converted into a dairy, faces on to a cobbled road and footpaths paved with slabs of hewn granite rather than the smooth concrete rectangles familiar to southern city dwellers. There are no trees in sight, no lawns, flowers or shrubs, no front gardens. The house is only one room wide; there is no provision for either a bathroom or a lavatory and there is no running water to either of the two bedrooms. The only lavatory is in a shed at the bottom of the back yard. It has no running water so there is no means of flushing it other than by taking a bucket of water from the house. The smell, summer and winter, is appalling.