Brixton Bard's poignant legacy

BORN to Jamaican parents, Alex Wheatle spent much of his childhood in a notoriously brutal children's home in South London.

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The former Shirley Oaks home in Croydon, subject to a 2020 independent inquiry, was where a young Alex endured horrific beatings at the hands of his housemother, who struck him with “coal shovels, hairbrushes, casserole pots, buckets and anything she could lay her hands on”, he said in his 2023 memoir.

His mother, Almira, was married with five children and “escaping a domestic situation” when she arrived in London.