Around the end of 1958 the family left the semi-detached house in Ledwell Drive, Glenfield and prepared to move into a brand new house in Braunstone South near the Narborough Road in Leicester.
The house wasn’t ready until the following Spring so for a few months we lived with my grandparents in Cleveleys Avenue close by. What I remember most about living there was getting a train set for Christmas.
Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery. There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself. He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.
Early in 1959 we moved to the new house in Chislehurst Avenue.
In the early twentieth century Braunstone remained a small settlement until 1925 when the Leicester Corporation compulsorily purchased the bulk of the Winstanley Braunstone Hall estate in what was known as Leicester Forest. Today the nearby service station on the M1 motorway is called Leicester Forest East Services.
Building commenced in the late 1920s and between 1936 and 1939 the estate of North Braunstone was built to accommodate families moving from slum housing within the city which were being demolished. When the poorer families had lived in the centre of the city there had been an appropriate infrastructure to support the community but none of these facilities were provided on the new estate. It was generally assumed that providing better housing conditions was a complete solution by itself. Some of the poorest of families from Leicester moved into the North Braunstone Estate and the concentration of these particular low paid and needy families earned the estate the title of ‘Dodge City’.
I mention this in a snobbish sort of way because Chislehurst Avenue is in South Braunstone which is a middle class, private ownership area where even today the residents take care to cling on to a separate identity from that of the social housing area of North Braunstone.
I have always been curious about the name. I assume that it was named after the town of Chislehurst in Kent because the neighbouring streets were Brokenhurst and Ashurst (Hampshire), Fieldhust (Berkshire), Fenhurst (West Sussex) and Stonehurst (Leicestershire). Naming of new roads and streets has to be approved by the local authority and that is why they are not always very imaginative. When I worked for a Council I remember a long conversation by the Members over the proposed name of Apple Pie Court which after an hour or so of tedious debate was eventually rejected as unsuitable.
There are a number of Chislehurst Avenues in the UK and two in Australia. The first is in Stratham, Western Australia, south of Perth and the second is over the other side of the country in the town of Figtree, south of Sydney in New South Wales.
We lived at Chislehurst Avenue for just over a year. Dad built a new rockery, I made friends with John and Michael Sparks who lived opposite, had my fifth birthday and started going to school at the Ravenhurst Primary where my first teacher was Miss Bird. Dad continued to cycle fifteen miles each way to work in the town of Hinckley.
This was not sustainable of course and in the winter of 1960 it became too much for him and he had to concede that he might have to consider leaving his beloved home town of Leicester. The only sensible thing to do was to move closer to his work so in the Spring the house was put up for sale and probably two years later than they should have done my parents prepared to move to Hinckley.
In 1960 a visit to the hairdresser was obviously regarded as an unnecessary expense and the basin cut was the fashion…
What amazingly cute little boy that was in a nice white shirt and tie!
We used to dress for dinner in those days!
Didn’t we all!
Nice to meet you Andrew. Just came across this blog. I dont remember you, but I was at school with Michael Sparks. I lived at 2 Castleford Rd (cnr of chiselhurst) in the 50s and 60s. Another lad across the road from Michael was Phil Beasley. Did you know him? I left age 15 at the end of 68 for Australia. Do you still keep in contact with Michael? I would be interested to know if he remembered me. Ivan Lawton
Hi Ivan, nice to meet you too. We did live close by didn’t we. I wasn’t there very long in about 19658-59 and then we moved to Hinckley and then to Rugby. By another coincidence my father’s name was Ivan and so is mine. Michael was a year older than me and no the two families never got in touch. I think his dad’s name was Bernard but I can’t be sure. I live in Grimsby now.
I lived next door to Ravenhurst Road school, and went to the infant and Junior schools there. I then went on to winstanly.
Thanks for adding your memories!
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It’s wonderful that you have all these photos, and memories.
Thanks Sheree, these posts are from my first blog which was all about these memories.
I did not know that you were a serial blogger!
I started in 2004 when AOL hosted a blogging site. They closed it down in 2008 I think and migrated everything to Blogger. I stayed there for a couple of years and then came across WordPress in 2009 and opened up two blogs. “Have Bag Will travel” and “Age of innocence” which was about growing up memories.
To date I have uploaded 4,519 posts to the sites.
Blimey!
Drives Kim crazy. The Internet never sleeps. I have created a Frankenstein monster that needs constant review and attention.
I can understand Kim’s reaction
I agree with Sheree. Any post I did from this period of my life would remain unillustrated, sadly.
That’s a shame.
It seems you moved a lot as a youngster. You are so cute! Great to have these pictures.
Dad changed jobs a lot as he sought promotion. The good thing about working in local government was that jobs were available all over the country. We settled down eventually.
These early memoirs are our bonus from lockdown. Those early cameras couldn’t cope with parallax without adjusting your aim. Maybe that was your Mum’s problem.
For my Mum the priority was getting faces mid frame and this meant generally speaking the feet had to go.
Most people chopped the heads off
Mum was very careful not to do that!
🙂
I do enjoy your scrapbook series.
Thank you Sue, much appreciated.
I love these memory posts, because we are roughly the same vintage and they are nostalgic for me too. Someday I plan to do something similar!
Thanks Anabel, I look forward to comparing notes.