What was the demographic of your childhood street?

[NewLion]

Families with young children

I agree with you that single parent families were rare in 70s/80s. When I was at infant school in 70s my mum was rare for being divorced and a single mum. Years later when kids grew up quite a few of the local school mums got divorces and left their husband and kids (now teenagers).

The one thing that stands out is that we all went to the same school at the end of the road so at weekends/ holidays the street was full of kids playing!

Families and pensioners. My grandparents lived next door to us! All council houses. Some people started buying their council houses by the time I was 11. All white - pretty much the whole estate. A lot of Irish (including us).

Someone mentioned single parents…that changed too as time went by. Many of the women became single parents, including my mum after our dad left.

Single parents weren’t rare on my street! More than half were single mums, I’d say, and a couple of single Dads.

Huge 3 story Victorian terraces and large detached houses with massive gardens in an otherwise very working class Northern town. It's where all the university lecturers and arty types lived. Working class people who had 'made it' all tended to live in big new builds out of town so it was left to the boho middle class types who could pick up houses that had been built for captains of industry for peanuts in the 60s/70s.

Growing up in the 1980’s my childhood street was a mix of 2 and 3 storey Victorian terraced houses, with the odd bungalow or detached house thrown in, some alms houses, a vicarage, a church, a primary school, and a few shops. All had gardens, not many driveways, but most had 1 vehicle for each property or none.

Some large families, young couples starting out, a large foster home, empty nesters, a fair few elderly widows, no widowers that I recall, single men in bedsits. A real mix of working class and middle class. All white, and vast majority white British. Mostly owned, but a fair few rented or tied to a local business.

All white. All families with more than 2 children.(row of 3 bedroom houses). All used to play out the front together (late 2000s/early 2010s) now when I drive by there’s rarely any kids playing must all be inside gaming which is kind of sad

Not necessarily, children play in their back gardens or at the park. I wouldn't live somewhere that kids played in the street, I would never have been allowed to but nobody did around where I lived as a child and it wasn't sad at all.

My child and those of neighbours didn't but all the children played in their gardens in good weather.

I’m talking about where I grew up, it was safe to play out the front of the houses, there were a lot of kids all playing together. Way too many to fit in one garden lol. When I walk past my childhood home it’s a lot quieter if they were playing in their garden I’d hear them

Council
house. Half private half not
some kids some elderly some married no kids. Culdesac of about 10 houses

Grew up on a small military base in Germany. I loved it as there were people of all races and ages. Kids played outside all the time, in the summer we would be out until 11pm. It was a small base in a small city, so it was very walkable. Walked to school until I was 12, would get off the bus and walk to the bookstore. And sometimes walk into town which was about a 30/40 min walk.

My childhood street had 4 houses (2 semi-detached) between 2 bigger roads. The 2 houses opposite us had older couples with grown up children, one couple had lived there many years and when the man died, the daughter moved in to care for her mother. Our next door neighbour had daughters who had their own children young and she was bringing up her grandchildren whilst her own daughters were still living at home. Most of the families with children my own age group lived in the streets either side.

My parents still live on the same street now. The son and daughter of the couple who lived opposite them when I was younger were living there until recently - apparently the son has dementia and the daughter has health problems and they are now both in care homes, they have no children and sold the house. The woman next door is living there with her granddaughter, who has moved out and come back to her several times (I have her on my socials), both her daughters have moved out and one lives locally. The granddaughter also had a child when she was a teenager, her son was brought up by his grandmother (my parents' neighbour's daughter).

1950s-built housing estate in rural area. Middle/upper working class. Mixed ages, some kids, some quite elderly. Racially homogeneous. Main difference now is fewer kids. Fast turnover of houses as people pass away.

Mostly older couples, some with children. Very quiet. Pretty wealthy demographic.

Council block of flats. A mix of elderly people (think Still Game), younger mostly single mum's (a few couples but not many) and drug addicts. It was a shithole which was long since demolished and good riddance to it. My children would be fucking terrified if I took them somewhere even remotely similar.

Remote island only children on it, sparsely populated mostly by alcoholics and people who had gone stir crazy from living so remotely.

Very well off area near town, lots of nhs/teachers. We had lots of similar aged kids, played out always. Ultimately the rates forced us to sell and move somewhere cheaper.

Mostly families with children a bit older than me and my brother. A few older people.

It got older and older and there were no children in the street for about 15-20 years.

Now it's mostly young families or couples moving to their first family sized house. My parents are the oldies now.

For the first few years of my life, we lived in a small village in the West Country. There were four houses in our road.

The first was owned by a farmer with young adult children. We lived in the second. The third had a middle aged couple with no children at home, and the fourth had a couple we assumed were married but, according to my father, were brother and sister. We children were a bit scared of them because their surname was Badman and the house was a very run-down old cottage with no electricity. We decided that the sister was a witch because she had a hairy chin, very few teeth, and always wore black clothes.

In many ways it was an idyllic spot and we had a huge garden which looked over open countryside. However, my mother hated living there as we only had one car, which my father used to get to work in the town four miles away. As a result, she was stuck at home all day. The village was so small that even then (early 1960s) it had no shop, school or church. It did have a pub, but she wouldn’t have been able to go in with four young children in tow, even if she had wanted to!

When I was 6, we moved into the nearest town and lived on a road of houses that had either families with young children or retired people.

A 70's-80's estate of detached and semi detached homes. Most were young families. They were a few older/pensioner couples. We knew virtually everyone and there were always neighbours to babysit, as my mother did for others.

Sadly where I live now is virtually all older/retired couples and can feel quite isolated.

Semi-detached. I think it was a new estate when my parents moved in early 1960s. The houses that I can remember were all families but I can’t say I noticed who lived in the other houses. Adjoining streets were very similar with children that I played out with. Some of the estate was slightly newer as I can remember the houses going up in the 1970s. There was a small row of shops and a pub just up the road which I think were probably built after our house, but I can’t remember them not being there.

ETA Lower middle class / working class. Mainly White British, although a couple of families where the parents were originally from Central Europe and later in the 70s, one family with Jamaican heritage.

I would also like to mention, if I may, when building this estate in the 70's & 80's one of the first things they did was build a new primary school, a church & hall, library, doctors surgery, pub and row of shops where you could get most day to day provisions - fish mongers, bakery, chippy, newsagent, butchers, hair salon, post office and a Co-op. They left open land of play fields and a play park. They don't really do that anymore, build all these facilities at the same time as homes. Most of these shops existed until well into the 90's. Now the butchers, bakers and fish mongers have gone, as has the post office. If you needed anything else or high school, you'd have to get to the nearest town. I do kind of miss it!

The estate was comprised mostly of hard working mortgaged families, all seemed to work, many mothers stayed at home, all in the same boat. I remember being a young child and a neighbour going to Disney World. We were all in awe - it was like a dream come true. No one we knew had been to Disney back then.

Terraced houses in the later 1940s/1950s. Most houses had 2/3 young children. Two were older women living alone. It was the era of the male bread winner and most women then did not work outside the home. It was not til I was 14 that my mother was "allowed" by my father to take a part time job in Vernons Pools. As soon as I began work at 16 she stopped working and I became the cash machine.