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| The fields were on the other side of the trees on the left of photo |
How we first experience a place is usually how we imagine it's always going to be - how it always should be in fact. That's how it is for me anyway. Case in point, when my family moved into a new house in another area in 1983, on the other side of the path which ran by our house, was a huge field - then a road, and then another field. And I believe there were even more fields beyond that.
That's how it was for the four years and three months we stayed there. Several years after having moved away, I revisited the area and was surprised to see that a large housing estate had been built on the previously adjoining fields. The sense of space was gone, and the neighbourhood now seemed over-developed, not to mention claustrophobic. From my point of view, the absence of the fields ruined the area, and I was glad that when I lived there, I experienced it at its best. In my memory, that's how the place should look - and still does whenever I think of it. (Just not when I revisit though.)
So do you feel the same about any place from your past where you lived or frequented when younger? Do you lament any changes, or accept them with no qualms - or don't they matter to you one way or the other? Should you feel the need to express yourselves, you know where the comments section is.
Hiya Kid. Hope you're keeping well!
ReplyDeleteI lament the disappearing geographical landscape and cultural reference points of my own childhood. Although I've travelled in life, I live in the city where I spent my childhood. Nothing's the same though. I look around and see a place I don't recognize. There's no connection any more! I think the city changed by increment, or perhaps I didn't change with it? Local schools changed their names, identities and uniforms. Local watering holes called last orders and were demolished. Cafe's populated by characters have gone, replaced by expensive city centre coffee shop clones. Numerous small Post Offices have shut their shutters for good. Smaller corner shops have been replaced by larger convenience stores. Wasteland playgrounds and farm fields sprout a claustrophobic New Build Paradise. The City of Prosperous Dystopia is expanding inward and outward, like an overfed fat man gasping for breath.
I guess it's like one of those confusing dreams, you know, where the scene should be familiar, but it's actually unfamiliar, unsettling and distorted. Nothing is as it should be, or was. Maybe I don't do 'change' very well? Maybe earlier generations felt the same towards the world I grew up in?
Take care Kid, Tony K :)
Hi TK, thanks for taking the time to respond with such an interesting comment - it should be a blog post in itself. You've encapsulated what I was getting at far better than I did, and I can totally relate to what you said. I don't do 'change' at all well and much prefer my town as it was when I was growing up in it, compared to as it is now. Thanks again for commenting.
DeleteA pleasure to comment on such a poignant topic, Kid. It's good to see you behind the keyboard again. Stay Strong!
ReplyDeleteTony K :)
Ta, TK - will do my best.
DeleteIn reply to your first sentence Kid, absolutely. I was born, and grew up in a small mining village in South Yorkshire. I lived in two adjacent terraced houses before a short move to the other end of the village. I left in my early 20's and have only been back a handful of times. The changes have been significant. The village has two halves, the 'old' village and the 'new', separated by a small hilly area known as The Common.
ReplyDeleteThe new village (mostly red brick, council houses and pre-fabs) had it's own shop, as well as the only chippie but the row of main road terraced houses I was born in were the de facto centre of the old village (mostly stone houses, farms, cottages etc) and had my family's corner shop, the only post office, butchers, public telephone, the local social & welfare club, primary school, garage, site of an old blacksmiths (from before my time) and a huge old vicarage as well as two pubs.
What's changed? Everything.
One of the pubs has gone, demolished to make way for a new housing estate on the green fields behind it. Fields that I regularly played in as a kid.
The vicarage has gone, it's large grounds now occupied by 3 or 4 detached houses.
The garage has gone - replaced by a new house.
The Post Office has relocated to the new village.
The butchers, and 'my' shop have closed and reverted to rented housing.
The public phone has long gone.
My uncle's farm on the edge of the old village has gone. After his death his 'modernising' son sold the land for development and it's now just a modern housing estate.
The primary school is still there but has been extended, with new buildings on the old playing fields.
The welfare club is gone - more housing and the green fields behind it (known as "The Welfare" or "The Wellie"), whilst still there, have lost the playgrounds and paddling pool they had through my childhood. The last time I was there, a few years ago, I struggled to even identify where the concrete based 'Policeman's helmet' roundabout or swings had been. Even the paddling pool, which was concrete and surrounded by a thick 3 foot high hedge, has vanished without trace.
ReplyDeleteIt's not the same place I grew up in, but I still want to go back, if only to die there. The row of houses I was born in were originally two-up, two-downs with no bathroom and an outdoor toilet. Each house had a small concrete back yard (no gardens) and a communal yard beyond those, where the toilets were.
My parents managed to buy the end two houses after originally renting the end one and then rented the other to my aunt (although it was years before I realised it wasn't hers). The front room of that house became the Post Office and the front room of 'my' house became the corner shop (both before my time). The back yard of my house was built on to create a two storey extension that housed a kitchen on the ground floor and an indoor bathroom and small bedroom on the first. We 'shared' the back yard of the PO until the mid 70s when it was extended too.
The side street has changed as well. I can visualise distinct phases but strangely cannot recall the times linking them. The earliest memory, from the 60's, was of a second row of terraces beyond our communal yard. These houses were demolished (I remember playing on the piles of rubble - reminiscient of one of the opening scenes of 'The Likely Lads'). The area remained derelict and undeveloped until after I left, but now a single detached house and garden occupy the same space that the 4 terraces originally did. There's just something 'wrong' about that.
The original lamp post that I remember climbing and swinging on (much like this one https://goo.gl/images/ZBakgK or http://www.streetlightonline.co.uk/24.htm, but shorter and more rounded with a lantern and cross bar) was replaced by a featureless concrete post and sodium lamp.
The whole area, of course, seems much smaller and I regret not appreciating what I had as a kid. It never occurred to me that such changes would, or could, happen. The root of it, of course, is population expansion. Continually squeezing more people into smaller spaces. It seems to be an accepted fact that this is how things have to be. I disagree. It would be refreshing to hear more people acknowledging that unlimited growth (of any kind) in a finite world is an impossibility. I'm reminded of Agent Smith's speech to Morpheus in the Matrix - https://youtu.be/IM1-DQ2Wo_w - "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realised that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague, and we...are the cure."
Agent Smith (and Urko) are my heroes.
Keep blogging Kid.
I hate it when they replace old street lamps and paving stones, as it changes the character of the surroundings - same goes for street signs, unless they're the same as the originals. That extract from The Matrix sure rings a bell with me - I've long thought that one of the easiest, laziest things for unthinking, unimaginative humans to do is breed uncontrollably, without any thought as to how it impacts on their own and others' futures. I suspect, like me, JS, if you were given a magic wand, you'd change everything back to how you knew it as a kid. I certainly would. Take a look at the post 'Heaven is a very small place' - I think it will resonate with you.
DeleteI’ve started to take photos of some of my favourite old haunts as at least I can resort to those. It started after Barclays closed in Goring-by-Sea. It isn’t the branch I lament but the striking Barclays eagle that once dominated the side wall - now just a blank canvas and a step backwards.
ReplyDeleteI've been doing that for a good many years, CN. However, there's been a few occasions where I've seen something I wanted to preserve on camera, and when I trotted along a few days later to take photographs, it was gone. One was a tree in a field I played in as a kid. "Must take a photo while it's still there," thought I. It was felled and removed not long after before I got the chance. I have had a number of successes in my quest to recapture my childhood and teenage haunts in photographs though.
DeleteHi Kid, hope you're well. My thoughts on this post may sound strange to some, but I miss the run-down feel that the areas I knew as a child once had. Don't get me wrong, the housing and streets have been repaired and improved, and the inhabitants undoubtedly have better living conditions, but I always liked the lived-in feel that I associate with my childhood. Most walls had bits of mortar worn away in between certain bricks where generations of kids had worn toe and fingerholds in them, faded graffiti hinted of the people who'd once lived there, their nicknames, allegiances and loves. I may have overanalysed my surroundings in those days, but I genuinely felt that every broken kerbstone, every fence with a missing railing, every wall with a missing brick had a story to tell, I felt like there was a living history all around me, that if the pavements could talk they'd tell me stories of thousands of bygone days and the people who had lived, laughed and loved all around them.
ReplyDeleteTheir was a big programme in the 90s that repaired and modernised a lot of parts of Glasgow, and it was badly needed. Selfishly though, I do still miss that feeling of history that my environment gave me at that time. I'm nor sure how much sense that would make to most people, but I have a feeling there's a few readers of this blog who'll know exactly what I'm trying to say.
In general, I feel that there is so much less individuality in our towns now- every town you visit these days seems to have exactly the same shops, pubs with genuine character are dying off and being replaced by aircraft-hangar like Wetherspoons, and what the hell happened to those second-hand bookshops that every area used to have? The shops that bought, sold and exchanged books, magazines and comics that were an Aladdin's Cave of treasures to many of us. They all seemed to vanish at some point around 1990.
I regularly have dreams where I'm walking around a place I think of as the Other Glasgow. It seems to be a mixture of the world of my childhood and my own imaginings of what Glasgow would have been like when I was born. I have dreamt of walking along canyon-like streets of sooty tenements which in real life were demolished decades ago. I've dreamt of street markets and bookstalls crammed with obscure crime novels and cheap comics. In a few of these dreams, loved ones who have passed away are still around, living happily where I remember them, as though time is fluid in this Other Glasgow and you can walk into other years as easily as walking along a street. I hope that doesn't sound maudlin, its really not- I always wake up feeling happy after these dreams and am glad that my subconscious is for some reason creating this place for me.
This has turned into a bit of a ramble, hope it makes some sense to someone!
I, on the other hand, miss the 'newness' of the New Town I grew up in (though I was born in Glasgow and lived there for the first year and a half of my life), so it's obviously a case of each of us yearning for what we grew up with - you the 'old', me the 'new'. Take a wee read at my post 'Heaven Is A Very Small Place', it touches on quite a few things in your excellent comment, DS. Thanks for taking the time and trouble to submit it. It's not a ramble in the slightest and makes perfect sense to me.
DeleteOh, and another one is 'If Only Everything Old Was New Again'. In your case, of course, you think the opposite, but you'll know what I'm on about.
Delete