Old Houses / Todays houses

[Rena]

A few years ago my oldest son visited and gave me photographs of all the addresses that I;ve lived in ,  the one I was born in was a neat two bedroom end terrace house with a laree back, front and side garden.  What a mess it looks now.  The low garden wall has been taken down with the small front garden a parking space for a large van and the long side gardens have one cheap industrial building on it.at looks like a commercial building;

My next home was where my brother was born .  It was a mid terrace house with bay windows at the front.  The fence has been taken down, the front garden cemented over and it too has become the parking space for a very large van.  The large van possibly explains why the garage at the end of the back garden has been removed and together with the rose bed and vegetable patch, all have been replaced with a long lawn.  The fashion these days is for "privacy" for the full length of the garden, which means the privet hedges have been removed and high wooden fencing now runs the whole length of the gardens.

[Rena]

I have been to view a couple of new build estates.  Some builders and architects must be having a laugh when they advertise a four bedroom house yet the kitchen isn't large enough to house all the gadgets such as washing machine, cooker, fridge and X amount of floor standing cupboards and drawers.    Apparently their assessment of buyers is poor when they think a Perspex see-through table and chairs will give the impression of a large room.   

A few years ago one of my grandsons visited and showed me pictures of his new apartment .  The rent was well over £800 per calendar month and for that sum he was paying to sit in a corridor as a sitting room overlooking the open plan kitchen sink, along the sitting room/corridor was the door to the single bedroom.     

I've just recalled a pal who went to view a new B====t house.  He needed a standard length bed of 6ft 6ins.  The largest bedroom was 6ft in length.    Maybe the company had decided the locals om that area were short. unfortunately my pal was a tall Scot..                           

[Andrew Tarr]

I don't think I have actually asked to see any ancestral homes, but I have taken a few passing photos.  My parents' house, nearly-new when I was born, has been extended and its surroundings are now quite different.  My maternal grandmother's family settled in Liverpool, and all their town homes are long gone, but she retired to Crosby, shown in the centre of this family photo taken in ~1910; my grandmother is on the right and my mother is the little girl.  The young lad signed up for WW1 but was killed by a train before getting there  .  The other shot was taken about 100 years later and the house doesn't seem much changed.

[Top-of-the-hill]

  What a lovely photo!

 I have never attempted to find any ancestral homes, as being mainly rural, I imagine they have all disappeared. The house I was brought up in, and which my grandfather lived in all his married life and beyond, was a white weatherboard one, built in 1900. I can't bear to see it now, as it is now stained brown, presumably a preservative, and appears to be left empty and going derelict. I don't know if it is privately owned or whether it still belongs to the estate.

[hanes teulu]

An aerial view of the manor/estate (Gravetye) was published in The Sphere, 29 Jun 1935, following its being gifted to the Min of Ag "with a view to its being applied to the promotion of forestry".

[Gillg]

We once lived in an old hall in the Lake District, which we shared with my brother and his family, as the house neatly divided into two, with two staircases and two front doors.  While we were living there we were quite often visited by people who had lived there previously.  It had been used as a prep school, a mink farm and a hotel, as well as just a private dwelling.  The interior hadn't changed much downstairs, but upstairs rooms had been divided to provide bedrooms for men working on the extension of the M6, who used it as a hostel, and much of the lovely plasterwork had been damaged, also all the doors had had Yale locks fitted.

[radstockjeff]

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to visit the house in which I was born and grew up in for the first nine years of my life. I knew that it had been extended but I think , on reflection , that I would have rather not visited. There was very little of the existing layout of the house which had not been changed in some manner. It was hardly recognisable as that in which I had grown up. Sad really, but I guess it fitted the requirements of the subsequent owners.

[MollyC]

I remember my father bringing home a small yew tree in a pot and planting it near the front gate, with the intention of having a clipped bush.  A couple of years later we left that house.  It has never been clipped.  Yews grow slowly - but it is now a very large tree and must take all the early morning sun from the front of the house.

[Gillg]

Even going back to your old home town can be traumatic!   When I did just that after many years away I was horrified at the way the place changed to what I can only call a dump, and I include my old house, too