What was the demographic of your childhood street?

[NewLion]

Families with young children

New 60s estate - all families with young kids. I was among the oldest. Many families had babies during my childhood. The average number of children per family was probably somewhere between three and four

As kids, we all played outdoors all summer. It was heaven, really.

I grew up on an avenue with families ‘like ours’ both my parents have degrees so doctors, teachers, lecturers and legal people. some were retired professionals.

My retired parents still live there. Their neighbours are similar professionals but seem to have a lot of money (large, Victorian villas in a nice area ).

Fairly affluent middle class people - mixture of families and empty-nesters. Rather nice detached/semi detached Victorian bay-fronted houses in SW London suburb. Worth a fecking fortune now - we sold and moved further out of London after my parents divorce in around 1981 for £89K - they are worth £1.5M now. Wish my mum had stayed there!

Newly built 60s houses in a cul de sac. Most were working class families with young children. There were always kids out playing and apparently it was known locally as the " street with all those kids".

Cows.
(Grew up on a farm.)

Well, that was enlightening 😂

West Yorkshire in the 60s, Victorian terraced houses at one end of the road, 1930s semis at the other. Resolutely working class, with a few “aspirational” families mixed in at the semi end. Most of my neighbours worked in one or other of the several woollen mills dotted about the town (my dad was a weaver), and my older brother was considered to have “gone up up the world” by landing a clerical job with the GPO.
I can only remember two or three families with children my age; most residents seemed middle-aged to positively ancient to my young eyes, and many seemed permanently grumpy! It was a good, if dull place to grow up. For all that it was a grimy mill town, there was plenty of green space, and open countryside was within easy walking distance.

A new town in the 60/70's. All council housing. Lots of working class families with children. It was a great place to grow up.

1959s, a terrace street with a mix of families with children, and elderly couples. Two families with mixed race children, including ours. My best friend lived at the top of the street and we played together in the back street.

Families of all ages. My grandparents lived on it too, as did quite a few of their generation. Plenty with kids our age. 1900-1940s semis and detached houses. Once affordable for normal income families (1960s-80s) but from mid 80s onward became more middle and then upper middle class. Average house price last year according to right move was £1.1m but the ones like ours were going for £1.5-2m. We were skint and working class and our house was scruffy. My grandparents were immigrants working in factories and unqualified nursing roles. Impossible for folks like that to get a foothold now, anywhere! Both sold before the massive price increases due to death and divorce so never created wealth. Not ethnically diverse really - few European families including mine, possibly one or two Asian families.

I grew up on a new build estate of 3 and 4 bed detached houses, at the very beginning the 90’s. Most of the houses were families with children around similar ages with the others being young couples. I have such found memories of playing on the street together and one of the dads would take around 10 of us out on a bike rides.

Didn’t live in a street.

Families with young children, later families with older children. They were town houses though so people tended to move away in retirement to somewhere with less stairs.

Tied cottages with farm or estate workers, mainly with children, no one retired they had to move out. Now rather posh! Although all the rather polished fields, borders and hedgerows are now in terrible disrepair, our old playing field and allotments covered in undergrowth and brambles, and a new estate built close by.

Late 1960s/early 1970s semi on a quiet cul-de-sac in northern England. Mainly families with young children; a few couples with children who had grown up and left home; one house with two lovely older ladies who were sisters.

All white British owner occupiers; most mums were stay at home mums. My DF still lives in the same house, and my DM was there until she sadly passed away last year. Almost all of his neighbours are the neighbours who were there when I was a young child.

Whilst I will always have happy memories of my childhood there, I’m also glad that I have since had the opportunity to live in other places, meet lots of people and hopefully broaden my perspective on the world.

Probably 3/4 families with school age children and 1/4 older couples. Pretty much all owner occupied I think although there was one house two doors down that had a high turnover of residents but I never saw a for sale sign so that one might have been rented. All white, tbh there were only 2 or 3 non white families in that particular village although neighbouring towns were more diverse.

Hasn’t changed much now from what I can tell.

Terraced town houses. Lots of MPs and people who worked in Westminster & Whitehall, and their families . It was 1980s - peak IRA. It was normal for one or two of the politicians to have police guards on their doorstep.

Older people as is the road we live in now, many retired, very few children

It was a newbuilt in a new neighbourhood when my parents moved in both my brothers. There were terraced houses and tons of families around my brothers age. When I came a long there were a little less my aged children but still quite a few. It was next to a forest so the forest was our playground. There was a separate parking space area so cars were not allowed to drive around the houses so we could run around without worrying about traffic.

Terraced street in inner London in the 1970s
Mostly white working class who had lived in the area a long time.

Three of the men did time for the same bank job.

In the 1980s the road was completely gentrified. Full of yuppies. My mum once said that at least the bank robbers had been honest about trying to make off your money whilst doing fuck all for it.

Council estate close with semi-detached houses built after the war. Big gardens. Mix of retired people and families. I could still tell you the names of all the families - everyone knew each other. A couple of families also had a widowed parent living with them. There were hardly any cars and we all played out together in the street and neighbouring fields. It was rare that we went into anyone else's house though, the odd birthday party maybe. Primary school was 5 mins walk. There was (and still is) a huge amount of green space in the area. It amazes me that no-one has built on any of it. Generally the men worked and the women part-time. 2 of the mums on our road were dinner ladies at the school. A lot of people bought their houses in the 80s and those are now relatively expensive for the area - decent size rooms, well built, lots of outside space.

Council house (they then bought it) on a long country lane in a rural farming village. Mega large garden with views for miles. Village was made up of a mixture of farming families, council families and older retired people. Had a pub, PO shop and primary school. (If you’ve ever watched this country, was very much like that!)

became very posh overnight, farmers got pushed out (they have local meeting where they discuss the state of different gardens and roads…. They banned tractors from going through the village as it made their posh cars dirty! Shop closed and the primary school died a death as the only kids of the village now go to private school.

house prices are through the roof now although it is a picture perfect chocolate box cottage style place.

A new build housing association estate, early 1980s. Mostly single-parent families but some had two parents. They were all 3-bed terraces with decently sized gardens, and there was also a small block of 6 flats that was entirely elderly people.

They had no central heating or showers. Only 2 households in our close (of over 30 properties) had a car.

Very large Victorian townhouses, a small seaside town a 5 minute walk from the Beach and 20 minutes to open fields. Lots of families, this was the 1970’s and 1980’s. We were the foreign family of six children and there were two families with five children each and then a few with two and my next door friend was an only child.

Many of us were close in age. Running up and down the street and when a little older from about 9 we were allowed on the beach. I was out playing from 2. Very little traffic and very safe. One of the Dads was a Blacksmith and had a small forge in his garden, my parents ran the local Chinese restaurant and take away and two of the Dads worked away a lot something to do with the sea but not sure what. Everyone knew everyone and we all walked everywhere. We are mainly girls and one of the families of five was all boys and our Mums used to joke about swapping a child, I hated my little sister so hoped it would be me.

The six bed house I grew up in is worth at least a million now. I think my parents bought it for about 4k in 1970.

Only one child in our primary school was from a single parent family, it was a very old fashioned sort of place. I look back and realise how free that childhood was compared to today.

My area when I was young wasn’t poor but wasn’t rich either, large Victorian house which my parents bought with another couple and then bought them out. There’s a nice block of council flats up the road and round the corner was a council dump, now redeveloped. The area is now apparently one of the nicest places to live in London but certainly wasn’t when I was young. We moved from Wimbledon when I was 2, my dad wanted to buy a property there unsure what happened. My mum when I asked her why she moved to our new area always said it was nice, near shops, school, church, train station.