Early Life
Felix Alvarez was born at Old St. Bernard’s Hospital, Gibraltar, to Felix and Laura Alvarez (née Parody). As a young boy, he attended St. Anne’s Middle School in Gibraltar.
Alvarez's family moved to London in 1959, living first near the Dalston/Hoxton area of the East End of London but spending the majority of his life in the South London areas of Clapham and Tulse Hill. Alvarez grew up bilingual in English and Spanish as do most Gibraltarians. Yet the experience of being "foreign" in 1960s London was not easy for him or his family. He has vivid memories of tobacconist notice boards full of accommodation "to let" signs saying "no coloureds or dogs".
The experience of "being different" in an unaccepting society alerted him from an early age to the situation of the marginalised. As a teenager, Alvarez attended Wandsworth Comprehensive School, a progressive post-grammar school model, famous for its boys' choir. It was during this period of his formative teenage years that, through personal contact, Alvarez joined Peter Hain in his Anti-Apartheid campaigns, work which he continued later at university as a young student in the early 1970s.
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