QUESTION for today: where are/were the streets Birdport and Dolday in Worcester? The one just about still exists, but of the other there is no trace.

The reason for their demise is that during the first half of the 20th century they were at the heart of the slum areas to the west of the city centre, mirroring the Blockhouse district to the east, where First World War padre the Rev GA Studdert Kennedy, better known as Woodbine Willie, plied his trade.

Much of the housing in these streets, and others like them, consisted of a collection of “courts”, which was rather a grand name to describe a courtyard of grubby, tenement properties gathered around a central area and usually serviced by communal wash houses and latrines.

Indeed, another First World War hero Fred Dancox, winner of the Victoria Cross for his bravery at Ypres in Belgium in 1917, lived in 12 Court, Dolday.

Sadly Fred never saw home again, being killed a few days after he captured an entire German machine gun position and its occupants singlehandedly, thus relieving his colleagues from its murderous fire.

The old Dolday was a narrow curving street that linked Croft Road with the Broad Street-Bridge Street junction and came out opposite All Saint’s Church.

Technically it is still there, but the whole length is now a three lane highway and only the first section, which passes the college building (ex-Russell & Dorrell and Countrywide), is called Dolday, the rest is the modern All Saints Road.

The Dolday area also included Newport Street and although it looks like a film set for a Charles Dickens story, almost unbelievably this photograph of Court Number 4 was taken around 1930.

It was the work of AD McQuirk for the city’s chief sanitary inspector, as a record of areas due for slum clearance.

The houses were, in effect, medieval and the conditions inside them are best imagined.

Large parts of the old city centre were “cleared” between the 1920s and 1940s and in Dolday this resulted in the large area of flat land at the bottom of Newport Street, which for many decades accommodated Worcester’s main county bus terminal.

Of Birdport there is no sign now, although Worcester folk of a certain age easily remember the name.

Once a narrow bustling street, it has been widened and incorporated into the northern end of the modern Deansway thoroughfare.

The byways of the area were always lively, for people got their entertainment there.

With no parks or playgrounds, hordes of ragged children played in the roads or on the quays and older folk brought out chairs on to the pavements to gossip and enjoy the air.

Musicians and singers would come round to entertain and one of the most popular was a lady with a large harp.

But you wouldn’t give much for her chances setting up in the middle of Deansway today.