Wigan Album

Too right Ron, and now with fancy names for the homes and fancy prices for the care too, if you can call it care, very often the service bell to summon help when needed is constantly ringing with all the staff carrying on and ignoring it, so you just may get help hours later.
This method of caring brings in a lot of money too because Lakeside at Worthington is having a huge extension built at the front.
This was once a large house called Burtholme and used as a council home for wayward girls, now as a care home it'll be as big as a small hospital.

Did the residents have to pay rent as such to stay in what were then council run OAP homes or were they paid for through the council rates.

sure that post box is still there

Used to walk past this every day on my way to St Cuthbert's school.
I remember that post box very well.

I remember a newly built Council care home being opened in Springfield Rd. Beech Hill about 1959. My grandmother went into there in the late 1960s and the deal was that the Council took her weekly state pension in fees and returned 10/- to her each week to purchase personal things such as newspapers etc. What a contrast with the fees being asked today. Even taking into effect the difference in today's currency and it's 1960s equivalent , today's fees are nothing short of daylight robbery. It all started to go wrong when the local authority abandoned the management of care homes.