Tony Lopez talks about entertainment in the early years. [Text only]

Coming to Stevenage in 1951 with my parents I was 11 years old and just ready to go into Barclay School there wasn’t much in Stevenage at the time for youngsters to do. In fact we tended to roam around in small groups and got into mischief and trouble and it was reported in the papers in, a few years after, that this was a spill over from London they called it ‘Little Soho’ for a while. And it was mainly gangs, there was nothing to do. We congregated down into Fred’s Café in the Old Town and just sat around the back room on the floor with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, talking about music but really had nowhere to go at that stage to actually dance unless we went into another town. We was eventually given a farmhouse in Wigram Way off the Paddocks Stevenage which we turned into a club and defended to the hilt from anyone else coming into it.