Before Holy Rood - More of Southampton's Lost Streets

First Published - 1st Nov 2025

Southampton’s Holy Rood Housing Estate covers a wide area east of the old town. Built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it replaced a mixture of crumbling Victorian terraces, tenements and courts that at one time formed the town’s most densely populated district. Affluence and poverty mingled side by side until it was all swept away by slum clearances, bombs and modernisation. Local historian Dave Marden looks back on what was there.

Author biography

Born in Southampton and growing up there in the postwar years, Dave’s working-class roots gave him an appreciation of life’s values. Apart from a few childhood years spent in north London, he has lived all his life in his hometown, watching it recover from the devastation of the blitz and then seeing many of his old neighbourhoods swept away in the name of progress with families, having grown up together for generations, uprooted and re-housed on new estates, far out on the alien fringes of the town.

His previous titles for JMD cover several areas of Southampton that include Chapel, Kingsland and St Marys whose old streets are now just memories of those that witnessed them

234mm x x156mm

312 pages

ISBN - 9781780916668