Lynda Stuart,KOVE

Transcript from various conversations between November 2023 and January 2024.

Kilburn Older Voices Exchange has been going since 2022.
One of the very first issues was that older people going out needed to sit down. There was a campaign to find out where the benches were - we located broken benches, missing benches,and dangerous benches and the founder of Kove Mel Wright, launched a campaign to get new benches.



The problem is people don't want a bench in their backyard - I don't want people sitting outside my property - but we insisted,and we get these benches in places like Shoot Up Hill.



And the latest success is two on the Brent side - that is like magic because it's been 4 years of holding the money and not having permission to put them in. And we're pleased with how they look. A funny design - we didn't have a say in that. One of these is outside Sainsbury's, on Kilburn High Road. There's a hostel opposite and the gentleman who would always look out of his window at Kilburn High Road now crosses over, sitson the bench and sees the world from the other sideof the road, which is rather nice.





My other bench story is the fact that a gentleman, who used to walk through this estate, often chatted with me and said I think you should have a bench.
We don't have a bench anywhere,he said, well, look, I'm going to die very soon and he put the £500 in an envelope, came past me one day and said get a bench. Now we have two.


I do love to show people around the estate. There are people living here in one of the 11 blocks that don't know where the other nine or ten blocks are. It's incredible. I mean, when I came here, I explored. How can you live in a place and not care?

You know that people are very nice to their three or four neighbours that they know, and they don't want to know the other 200.

Whenever I ask for help, I get help, but nobody ever knocks on the door and says, hey, what are we doing tomorrow Lynda?

I’ve been living here for 25 years, but I only started getting this involvement about seven years ago. I’m working on the shared spaces and the gentleman comes past me and says can you do the end bit where Camden won't touch it? And I said that's quite a bit of a huge job.

I was convinced that nothing would happen without a tenant's residents association. And  it is true.

I've got paintings on the walls. We've got murals everywhere. I got fencesreplaced. All sorts of little things were achieved and at the moment I'm having quite an argument about the state of the paths, which I think are quite dangerous, so I’ll campaign, and I do get some help if I ask, people are very willing, but they don't sort of come forward and offer.

I went down to the Holborn Archives to find out how this estate was built, and there's very little record of it, except that the lady who was a councillor, decided to knock down the slums because there were slums here.

And then built Webheath right on the middle of Palmerston Road which is stupid because it cuts Palmerston Road off.

She found that as soon as people moved into the flats that they were complaining about wet damp of water coming in, so she said I'm having nothing to do with this and she got her name taken off it and 65 years later we're still having water ingress. I'm not going to give up.

I mean, I was told at one point, to stop climbing over fences. And clearing up litter and garden refuse. And I'm afraid I'd rather ignore that instruction because I live here, I want it to look nice. I can't do so much climbing about. But there are other ways, I mean.





The Golden Gnome, was a little prize for gardening, and I was the only contestant, so I got the prize. It's a shame people don't get involved - now talk about belonging to On Kilburn which has been going on for a year that has brought many organisations together.