The Hostel
Top of St Hilda's Way

Aerial view of the hostel.
Houses in Buckingham Way and Oakland Way are still to be built but the roads are already in place. 		    The site of the Hostel now

The hostel grew for working men
Much needed all around
Who had no chance of finding
Any home within the town.
Displaced because of fractured times,
And some from miles away,
The hostel gave them shelter
In the hope that they would stay.
Altona Road is testament
To the fact that many did,
For their monuments and headstones
Prove the lives these people lived.

Altona Road cemetery in Loudwater (up Derehams Lane) has many graves of overseas workers, who no doubt came here as refugees as a result of the war, and found work in the paper mills and the chair factories in the valley below. The Hostel held film shows and thus it was a popular place to go to if you were growing up at this end of the village. It was demolished in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
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