Going back to where you were raised

I have to go every Monday and pick my 92 year old mum up ! I drive home every week feeling so grateful that I don’t live there anymore !

My sisters and I grew up in a house in Belfast.We all moved away,me to Canada,one to New York and the other moved to Edinburgh. We three all got together in N.Ireland five years ago.By chance I discovered the daughter of the family who bought our house in 1962 was still living in our old house. I wrote to her to say we three sisters were meeting up and we would love to visit the old house. She kindly agreed and we met her and she gave us a tour inside and out. It was till very much as we remembered though much improved.It brought back so many memories of our childhood.My two sisters and I all agreed it was the highlight of our get together.

I've not been back to the area where I was brought up sine my parents moved from there in the 70s. I did,however, go back to where I went to high school about 5 years ago to the funeral of an old friend. My daughter took me and i was telling her how the area was where the 'posh kids' at the school came from, I could not believe the difference, it looked a real slum. Whereas the area that I actually lived is now a sort after, very expensive part of East London.

I drove down the street I lived in until the early 70’s when I was 10 years old after a family funeral a few years ago, I remember it from my childhood as being lined with lots of trees with small but green well tended front gardens on both sides (small mid war semis 3 or 4 miles from a city centre), but Dutch elm disease meant all the trees were removed many years ago, and many of the gardens are now tarmaced over, the narrow road seemed packed with cars, so it’s no longer the kids playground I remember. It’s still a nice neighbourhood but the lack of greenery and space made me sad! As a previous poster said, I was surprised that the houses and street seemed a lot smaller than I remembered!

I went back to the street where our childhood home was. When we were young the street seemed awfully long but now it really doesn't at all. The house has a garage but not much else has changed.

Almost every house has a car parked outside but there were hardly any then, perhaps three at most on the entire street.

The 'rec' now has proper railings around the swings, etc and there's soft landing material whereas we had to take our chances on hard tarmac with many a bruised knee or smacked elbow, etc.

I often look on Google Earth at the street where i was raised for 11 years, also the primary school too. Look at my Nan's street in Edmonton where i use to stay during the school holidays as well. Both houses and streets look totally different.

I too was born and grew up in East London going to the local girls school across the road. I did visit regularly until I lost both parents but the local market has changed character no longer run by the cockney stall holders and all the local shops were now trendy. The demographic had also changed no one would have believed in the sixties how much property would cost especially as most people lived in council houses.

A while ago my son took me to an exhibition in London. I grew up there late forties/ fifties/sixties. I took him to see where we used to live. I wish I hadn't. Our lovely house was now flats and the square all railed in and you had to have a key. The surounding streets unidentifiable and dirty looking. I certainly couldn't afford or want to live there now.

I still live where I was bought up.
In a flat that wasn't here years ago, on a huge estate which also wasn't here then.
I go past my mums, which is now grey cladded, with the garden paved over. Sigh...

The house we lived in and brought our 4 children up in (Australia )over 30 years ago, has been heavily renovated and recently changed hands for a couple of million. Maybe we should have stayed! I do miss the huge garden, it was lovely and you could grow anything, the soil must have been really good.

I still live near the area my two sisters and I were brought up, and regularly pass our old homes etc.

In September, however, one of my sister's and me are going to Ikaria, a small Greek island to see where our maternal Grandmother was raised. It is not a commercialised island, so we hope not much has changed. There are still family living there too.

It was very difficult sorting transport to the island though as the ferries and small planes only fly there on certain days.

How lovely that sounds CraftyGranny. It will be so beautiful and peaceful.

We live within miles of my childhood home. My family live nearby and we visit regularly.
The bungalow I grew up in has had an extra floor added to make it a house, and there is an extra house built nearby. Otherwise, little has changed.

My grandmother had a big old Victorian house which was sold after her death in 1979 and the proceeds split among her daughters and grandchildren. The contents were left to me so I had to organize a house clearance double quick so my aunts could put it up for sale. It was a lot of hard work and very traumatic going through my grandmother's things. I had been far closer to her than my parents. I did keep some small items of furniture (which I still have) and a couple of pieces of her jewellery to remember her by.

On the same visit that my sister and I went back to look at our old home we also went to look at my gran's house. It had been split up into flats and the area had gone down somewhat. I was upset about that but I doubt my grandmother would have cared overmuch. She was very unsentimental about material possessions and it was in her will that the house was to be sold and the contents disposed of.

I 2010 my sister and I went back for a holiday to the small town in Renfrewshire where we had grown up and which we had left nearly forty years earlier.

We went primarily to visit the only friends from our childhood still living there, not really to see the town.

Neither of us really enjoyed seeing the town again. Looking back we realised that there were changes for the better, but the overall impression was that the level of poverty, unemployment and the look of poor health and shabbiness amongst the people had increased in the time we had been away. It had been large enough to strike two 20 year olds forty years earlier.

We walked past the house we had grown up in, but both our parents being dead and not really knowing the family who had bought the house when they sold it, we decided against asking if we might visit the house.

We both felt a bit like ghosts walking around in a place that was and wasn't "ours" as it had been.

We felt even more ghostlike in Paisley, which we remembered for its good shops, now all gone, perhaps due to the "new" Shopping Centre.

Glasgow is certainly cleaner than it was in our childhood, but otherwise seemed to have "shrunk" or diminished in some way neither of us satisfactorily could describe.

I wouldn't want to go back again.

I have also sometimes gone to the neighbourhood my maternal grandmother lived in when I was a child. It too has changed so much that it saddened me to see it.

So I have no intention of going to revisit the village where my parents spent their retirement.

Sorry. Little bit off point, but I love the fact that a man who has travelled the globe numerous times and ironically has made a vast fortune from his “Born to Run” lyrics actually lives close by his home town in New Jersey. On a ranch now as compared to his humble start, but nonetheless Bruce has stayed close by and is often seen driving round town.

I lived in a house that was due for demolition but was opened up fir my parents to live in just after the War 1944. It was by the Shipyards in Newcastle. It is no longer there and factories have been built. We were rehoused when Council estates were built. Thought we were the bees knees with electricity and a bath.

nanna8

How lovely that sounds CraftyGranny. It will be so beautiful and peaceful.

We are really excited now nanna8.

I last went back to my childhood home 23 years ago when my mother died. The immediate area was pretty much as I remembered it. When I was growing up there it was a slightly rough run down area but it looked tidier, the big Victorian houses better maintained.

My primary school was still there (it's a listed building) but my secondary school was gone, replaced by a housing estate. Some of the local shops were now coffee shops or sandwich bars, and the small hardware store was now a cocktail bar! The very pretty public rose gardens where I had spent so many happy hours as a child was still there but now it was no more than a large leafy roundabout, a shortcut from one main road to another, all the beautiful roses had gone.

The Library where I had learned an appreciation of books and reading had been replaced by a much bigger library (two adjacent houses had been demolished to build it) with bars at every window and a secure entry system. That said a lot about the area. I noticed lots of houses had barred windows too. It may have been rough when I lived there but no-one ever felt the need to bar their windows and doors!

The lovely old church where Mr H and I had been married (and also my parents) had survived, but the lovely rose arches and flowering shrubs that made it so pretty had been stripped away and it now looked very stark, so different to my wedding photos. The vicarage had been turned into flats.

I spent nearly a month emptying my Mum's house and in all that time I didn't meet a single person that I knew in the area. Before I finally left I did a tour of the neighbourhood and places I remembered and took lots of photos to add to the family history files. I have not been back since.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for some sewing accessories and Google flagged up a shop very near where I grew up. I didn't recognise the name even though it said they had been there for 3 generations! So I did a StreetView tour looking for it, slowly travelling roughly 5 miles along a major road. That area had changed a lot, it was very gentrified now, a lot of money had been spent tidying it up, attracting more business. But many of the lovely old terraces of houses were gone replaced by ugly boxy flats and housing estates, it looked sterile. But what shocked me most was the GRAFFITI - it was everywhere, on every wall and building, on pavements, shops, schools and nurseries. Miles and miles of it! And it wasn't artistic Banksy style graffiti it was just peoples tags, messages, obscenities etc. It was horrible and so ugly. All that effort to improve the area and now they were ruining it with graffiti! I did eventually find the shop I'd been looking for (still didn't remember it) only to discover they wouldn't deliver to our part of the country.

I had a happy childhood but still harbour some disappointments and regrets. But I won't be returning to the area again, I prefer to remember it as it was when I lived there, 'rough' it may have been but it had heart and community spirit and most people had respect for their surroundings and each other.

I haven’t been back to the house in Tooting, London where I spent the first eleven years of my life but I have looked it up on Google and Rightmove. My father bought it in 1923 the year I was born for £100. Newly built small three bedroom end of terrace house with all latest mod cons of the time On what had been a golf course. From the front it looks just the same but the interior has been modernised. It is now on the market for £660,00.
It was within walking distance from Mitcham then in Surrey, where there were lavender fields and old cottages.

I went back for my mother's funeral and it reinforced my feelings for the place which features in Britain's worst towns list top 10 every time .When I tell anyone where I grew up they look surprised . It's still run down and rather like a sink estate , with people having fierce rows in their pyjamas in the middle of town. Drugs are rife, ambition is low. When I was a child there I went to school 10 miles away and we were told by our careers teachers to disguise our address where possible as we would never get a job if they knew we were from ....
I grew up feeling ashamed of my roots, as we lived a slum clearance area , and we were just waiting for the compulsory purchase order.
Now I'm in my 70s I can see why the town had a raw deal .It's in the North and lost out to more vibrant places nearby. Industry was closed down and no investment put in. Lovely friendly people and some stunning buildings. It has featured as in a few films .My family was rather dysfunctional but loving .I've come to terms with it now and I'm not ashamed to say where I come from now. Someone has to come from there. I'm not saying where it is as I don't want to upset anyone from there , but you'll understand if you are.

When I went back to my childhood home in Cheshire it was very much more built up than it was in the past. The fields, woods and ponds of my youth had gone, all built on. It’s still quite a pleasant place, but not nearly as good as it was. The house is still there, but the road is properly made now, not the muddy lane I knew and loved.

I was born in my family's council house, moved away age 19 when I got married, moved 5 times and was looking for a year to find a bungalow to rent anywhere in UK. Unbelievably found one just up the road from my childhood house so go past it quite often. All the hedges are now fences and the house and street look SO small. Would love to go in the house but don't know the tenant so won't ask.

On my 21st birthday I calculated that I had had one permanent address for every year of life in places as diverse as Carlisle, London, Hong Kong and Germany.

If I take the place I lived longest, well I go past the end of the road frequently, however I cannot drive up it because it is an army quarter on an army base.

In my youth the base had an ordinary chain link fence round it and the estate of army quarters were as open as any other road in the town, but since the start of mainland terrorist activity by the IRA in the 1960s and now the violence of muslim, nationalist and right wing extremism, the base and its quarters have seen security ramped up, double fences, dogs wandering between them. All entry only through the guard house, even for the families living in the quarters. So unlike the freedom we had as children.

I drove past the end of the road this morning and glanced up it through the swathes of fencing and barbed wire. I would love to see the house again.

No one left there - family either moved or passed away - still have some lovely friends left. But will have to fly thousands of miles to get there. I have the fondest of memories of my childhood.