A house at 111 Clyde Street, next to Footrot Flats, on which fans of The Clean painted the lyrics of “Sad Eyed Lady”. The flat came to be known, according to Graeme Downes, as the “It’s time to go” flat, after the final line in the song.
Great photo here of a bit of Clean graffiti by Allisonwonderlandz on flickr.com.
In Visions of Dundas Street through student coloured glasses, Hamish Mckenzie recalls Dundas Street, pater familias of local scarfies, bridging the Water of Leith and slowing speeding cars with its double dose of hemorrhoids. A more gentile work referencing Dundas Street is Bernadette Hall’s Lacework, recalling the iron lace on the verandah of her childhood home at number 118.
Just around the corner from Dundas Street, Castle Street is refered to, infamously, in Baxter’s A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting, where he says he dipped his wick back in the day where mixed flatting was a social no no.
Joanna Preston recalls “… scarfie flats with names and legends passed down from pisspot to pisspot …” up the Valley, in A visit to Nicky’s place. I particularly enjoy the later, and what this infers in terms of the project I’m working on.
View the OUP page about Under Flagstaff
That’s how many peeps we have on the Dunedin named student flats group now. Today – tags applied to photos of Frottage Cottage and Dicken’s Cider House.
There are now 880 members of the Dunedin named student flats group – some new flats from the 1960s – Free Latvia, Nightmare Abbey, The Department of Slovenic Studies, and The House at Pooh Corner.
I’m really keen to hear from people fro the 1940s and 1950s who may remember named flats – a couple I know of are The Lighthouse (Heriot Row) and The Jam Factory (Filleul Street).
I’ve just heard from one of the few surviving residents of The Bach, typed on an old school typewriter on onion skin paper. Ferg has gifted me a beautiful, ragged piece of their letterhead, which depicts the crest and motto, in Greek, which in translation reads, “beacuse of poverty”.
I’m attempting to relax it using a damp cotton tea towel sitting in a roasting dish and misting it gently with water.
The Love Shack (St David St), Playboy (previously Hyde St Hilton, Hyde St), Club Mike (Cumberland St), The Pink Pussy (Cumberland St), The Penthouse (Heriot Row), Mung (Cumberland St)
AND there are now 873 members of the group – awesome!!
A huge flat up on Heriot Row.
Here’s one of the new kids on the block. An homage to the Scarfie’s best mate, the 24 hour dairy.
Abbey College, hall of residence, was once Abbey Lodge, it’s a crazy rough cast Spanish styled motel. It doesn’t complement the Victorian and Edwardian architecture of the area.
Once upon a time in the 1970s there was a flat on Castle St, opposite Abbey College called Nightmare Abbey – did the name of the flat influence the name of the hotel???? Jim Mora, broadcaster and resident of Nightmare Abbey is convinced it did.
Dunedin Flat Names Project 