On the street where I once lived.

I’ve been all around the world and today I stood back where it all started.

I have lived in many places, both  north and south of the equator but in the beginning there was Hull.  I left when I was 9 but there is something about the place that resonates with me still and despite the many roads that took me away from the place there is still part of me that thinks of it as home.  Perhaps it is because it fills my very earliest memories and names and places that I should have forgotten remain with me still.  Maybe it is because the accents and turns of phrase hold for me a comfort and familiarity which I cannot describe but that make me feel part of something in many ways long forgotten.

Whatever it is I always enjoy the occasions when I get to go back.  Today was one of those days when I got to met up with family on my Mum’s side to celebrate my cousin’s son’s 21st.  My mum is one of 8 and at last count there were at least 48 of us on that side of the family so there are always reunions to be had even if we don’t always remember each others names.

Whilst the day itself was great it was the detour on the way home that I enjoyed most.  I decided to go and take a look at the house I grew up in as I had heard that the estate is now mostly derelict and scheduled for demolition.  Sadly it is and the photo below shows the house now.  It is only the left hand side of it.

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So many great memories came flooding back and as sad as it is times change and things move on and whilst it was a quite wonderful place in the late seventies it’s days are now sadly numbered. I remembered old Stan from across the street who we would taunt with songs of ‘Stan stan the mucky old man washed his face in a frying pan.’  God kids are bastards.  Stood outside I could still hear the sounds of kids laughing on a late summer evening and playing ‘Kerby’ as cars passed us by.  With a smile I remembered painting the electricity box with oil paints and my dad being so angry and I could still see snow falling through the amber lights in winter.  I also remember where I was when I was told that a friend of ours had died that day.

Such a mix of emotions and memories but it was not all sad though, and in fact it turned out to be a pretty amazing trip when we saw what had been done to a number of the properties in the area.  Keep in mind that there are probably a few hundred of these places being demolished and though the memories and lives that have been lived will remain eventually there will be nothing left of themso to see what some amazing graffiti artists did to lift the place was just fantastic.

I think the photos say it all.

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The homes will be gone in 6 months and will be replaced with new builds and the hope was that there would be less chance of people vandalising them if they were decorated.  The more things change the more they stay the same I guess as eventually new families will move in and the cycle starts again.

 

Author: Michael

Husband, dad,(ex)programmer, comic collector and proud Yorkshireman. I have no idea why im here or why im writing but i rather enjoy it. no great fan of punctuation;

26 thoughts on “On the street where I once lived.”

  4. This is a lovely share! You made me tear up a bit. I’m so glad you had this opportunity to take this detour.

    I’m not gonna lie… I was moved. So nice to get to know you better.

    Funny how I was just reading one of your posts about how you can’t write the deep stuff and I commented you didn’t have to go far from MA to write something poignant. Well… I think you just did. You did exactly that.😊

    This post resonates with me and I’m sure it will with others.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Eyeball critter, pink cat, and drunk occy – love ’em!
    The place I spent the first 8 years no longer exists anywhere but my memory – which is just the way I like it – I can colour it any way I like, just like the graffiti.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Not so much if it was ‘nice’, but the memories you own are your own, and you can tinge them or colour them or discard them – at will.
    The reality of the past is a place we cannot revisit, and for that I am very, very glad. Memory, in all its forms, can be swayed.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. That is awesome graffiti and a very poignant piece. When I got online for the first time and found Google maps, I Googled my childhood home – we lived there until I was 10 when we moved to the States. I had memorized that address when I was just a little tyke before I went to my first day of school. I put it in the search bar – nothing came up – tried again and still nothing. I later saw a Facebook site for the elementary school I attended and was reading some of the posts. It turned out the administrator of the blog was a computer tech, had his own business and was familiar with the City of Oakville. So I mentioned looking for the house – he found a virtual tour of the house from five years before, sent that and then told me a few years later a builder demolished all the houses on that street – made all larger houses in their place – I was looking at a totally different neighborhood, even the addresses no longer matched up.

    Liked by 1 person

  20. wow, those murals are so cool. Sad that they are ephemera and will disappear along with the buildings. Cool that you shared your memories with us.

    Liked by 1 person

  21. No, it was okay as it was the new house … and I could not believe that my house was gone and all the other ones. I could have told you what each house had looked like as I played with the kids down the block when I got a little older and I passed all the houses enroute to school. The property was fairly large in front and the guy who told me this said it was more profitable to raze all the houses and rebuild. But why would people sell their houses unless they were given a very good incentive to do so. Made no sense to me.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. Sorry to hear about your childhood home. There is graffiti and then there is art…this stuff was beautiful. Sad that the talent these taggers have doesn’t get used for what it is worth.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. I love adventure time, and I love graffiti art…
    I’m living back in the city I was raised in my earlier youth (birth to 12), there’s so many places here I used to live and when I visit I remember things, good and bad… The one place is where my dads house used to be, since torn down and been rebuilt on. But the neighborhood has so many memories for me (again, good and bad) that going back there is like opening a time capsule… The only thing missing is my dads house and the huge oak tree in the front yard…

    Liked by 1 person

  26. Im with you on adventure time i just love it ! I still watch it even though the kids have mostly stopped!

    I guess those memories are all part of what makes us who we are…good or bad right

    Liked by 2 people

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