📍Putney, London SW15, UK
1883 – 1901“I was born in January 1883 at our family home in Putney, then a leafy, prosperous suburb on the Thames, the seventh of eight children of Henry Attlee, a City solicitor, and his wife Ellen. Ours was a large, comfortable, devoutly Anglican household, full of servants, books and certainty. My mother taught me at home until I was nine, and from her I gained a lifelong love of literature and poetry. I was a shy, small, rather conventional boy, and when I went on to prep school, Haileybury and Oxford, I was a cheerful Conservative who took my comfortable world for granted. What changed me was a short journey east. In 1905 my brother Laurence took me to the Haileybury Club in Stepney, a club for working-class boys run by old boys of my school. I kept going back, and in 1907 I became its manager and went to live there. In those streets I saw poverty that Putney had hidden from me: boys who went home not for dinner but to see if there was any dinner. I lived at Toynbee Hall, read the socialists, and joined the Independent Labour Party. It was in the East End, not in any book, that I learned what politics was for. I served at Gallipoli and in France, became mayor of Stepney and then its MP, and in 1945 led a Labour government that founded the National Health Service and the welfare state. Putney gave me my education and my sense of duty; Stepney told me what that duty was.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today