FORMER Lord Mayor Bill Buckingham and his wife Margaret moved to Rose Hill when they started their family in the early 1950s.

Mrs Buckingham died last year, but her husband has continued to live in the same house in Court Farm Road where they raised their three children.

“I’ve been the secretary of the Rose Hill Community Centre for 60 years,” he said. “I was the chairman of the centre down at the bottom of Ashurst Way.

“It was a great big army hut during the war and they used to have dances there. Unfortunately somebody got underneath and set it alight. Nobody was in it and we found a charred ruin when we woke up in the morning.

“So I got a committee together and we met at my house. The vicar at the Methodist church was very active and got the community going.”

After negotiations with the city council, land and funding was secured to bring the community centre to the Oval, where it still hosts clubs and meetings today.

Mr Buckingham, 90, said: “When they started to pull the concrete houses down they moved a lot of people out – they had a choice of Littlemore or staying in Rose Hill. There’s quite a change of population now. There are many other nationalities here, there are Ghurkhas and Indians and a lot of Muslims have moved in.

“It has changed with the new influx of houses and it will take many years to build back the sort of estate feeling we had. Most of them are strangers to the area, but it will mix together again.”