Jeremy Iles

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Jeremy Iles: Of course everybody walked to school. I guess it took about 15-20 minutes to get there. We grew up in a time when kids played outside in the back garden, in the street, on your bike, on your scooter. We lived in Paignton which was a seaside town, well still is obviously a seaside town. As we got older, we had bikes from the age of, what, six, seven and we would just go off down to the seaside, muck about, play on the beach, stuff like that.Toby Butler: Wow, okay. So we’ve got quite a lot to unpack there and it’s interesting that the cycling has come in so early as well so that’s great. So let’s just start off then with the first house because it sounded like you were there for the first ten years of your life. So can you just give me a little word picture of what it was like inside, perhaps know what your bedroom was like and so on.Jeremy Iles: I can’t really remember. It might be worth mentioning that I was born in Devon but my brother was born in Swindon in Wiltshire. My parents both came from Swindon. So I guess, I never really thought about this, this was their first house that they bought after moving out of Swindon, yes.Toby Butler: So why would they have moved to Paignton?Jeremy Iles: Probably career thing for my dad, probably just a better quality of life. I mean Swindon, in those days, was an industrial working town, Great Western Railway, lots of, what else was there, tobacco factories I seem to remember. It was one of those industrial towns where the sirens used to go to let people know when it was time to get up and when the shift would change, that sort of thing. So I guess for them it was just like a better quality of life and going somewhere which was aspirational, a nice place to go. So the bungalow, I can’t really remember much about it. Paignton is a hilly place. Barnfield Road was on a slope. You came down the front steps outside the house, front steps down to an elevated brick walkway into the house. But the interior I can’t really remember at all to be honest.Toby Butler: Well tell me perhaps more about the neighbourhood then. Was it a very residential area or was it mixed?Jeremy Iles: Yes. I mean the road was called Barnfield Road so clearly it was built on what used to be fields. They were all those houses which I guess would probably be 1930s, 1940s, I’m not really sure. It might have been early ‘50s so yes, very residential as the town had spread out of its- I mean it was quite an ancient town. It’s got a Norman church. But as the town spread out like everywhere else, it went up the hills and these streets were all residential. They were all private housing but there were lots of council housing, social housing as well alongside it. Again, the cars were there but I think we used to travel around mostly by bus in those days. Buses were good. The streets were relatively quiet and relatively safe so we were allowed out to muck about and play around. We did move house probably when I was about six or seven, so down the road to this other house, 31 Barnfield Road. That was further down the road and was quieter. So we would play out in the gardens, quite big gardens. There were places where you could walk, cut throughs that you could walk out on to different roads. There was one route we used to take down to the right [interviewee correction: left] at the bottom of the road and down this slope on to a traffic free route which would take us down to Blatchcombe Road. That’s the way we used to walk to school. Then the other end of the street you could turn down to the right down a steep slope which would bring you down to the edge of the actual town.Toby Butler: Did you go into town very much at that age and play on the beach? Was that a big thing?Jeremy Iles: Yes, I remember going shopping with my mum. This was just before supermarkets really got going. So there were lots of local shops where you would go in and order stuff and then they would deliver it for you. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? There was a big department store in Paignton, it was called Rossiters. There was one in Torquay called Rockheys. Rossiters by the way was the role model for ‘Are You Being Served?’ apparently. So we’d do that. I remember a lot going to fish and chip shops, especially when we had a bit of pocket money we’d do that. Then I had a friend called Barry and we used to ride around on our bikes. This is probably from the age of seven or eight. In those days there was a returnable deposit on lemonade bottles. So we’d go down town to the beach in the summer and collect up all these bottles that tourists would leave lying around, take them back to the fish and chip shop where they would give three pence and then we’d buy chips with it. So we got our independence that way.Oh yes, the really big thing in those days was lots of kids, both at Oldway Primary School and other primary schools, there was a communal gathering of boys on the Saturday morning at Victoria Park to play football. So like kids from all over Paignton would come to this public park and it was just a big thing, if you played football. My brother didn’t so he wasn’t really involved in that. That was quite a big deal, that you could all just do that. It was independent and it was safe. Your parents just let you do it, you know.British Library catalogue number: C2037/04 Project clip number: 8