Hi Paul, my mother and I left Guildford Street around 1964 after my father had died and my brother and sisters were all married. Your house was was where I thought. It was the Keelings who lived next door to the Wells. Mrs Keeling was Pat, the daughter of the Rudhalls (the shop at number 24). The shop next door to the Rudhalls was number 26 where I lived. It hadn't been a shop since the thirties before my family moved there in the late thirties. I think it was a drapers shop.
The shop part was at the front of our house and my father used it as a workshop - he mended neighbours radios and later tellys. In the late forties My parents let the Rudhalls renovate the shop as they planned to reopen it but they did not get a licence. They did use part of it for a store room as there was a door between their shop and ours.
Jack Rudhall died around 1963 and Molly moved moved out. The door between the two shops was sealed and someone else took over.
If you played dart in our shop it would have been after we moved out. If we moved out in 1964 you would have been about 8, I was 23.
The girl I remember living in your house was perhaps from the previous tenants family. When I knew her I would have been around 10 or 11 when us kids played together in the yard. That would have included me, the girl from number 15, Johnny Wells and his cousin Duncan Bagley who live up the street at the back of number 14 (Eden Place) and Christine Trotter who live at number 16 in the Barracks.
The last time I saw number 26 was around 1968.
I was a student in London then and had been visiting my mother who lived in West Heath then. Mush of Guildford Street was demolished then including the Barracks. Number 26 and 24 (Rudhallls) stood in isolation amongst the remains of the demolished houses.
The next time I visited there was a new estate; the geography had changed and it was now Guildford Drive. Somewhere on this forum is a copy of a short story I wrote about that visit. The story tells of me finding the base of the tree which was opposite the Trotter's house which was next to the brew house, behind your house.