We lived at No.43 Gibbins Road with our back garden onto the railway embankment. No.33 was the first remaining house in the terrace with all others (up to what was Lett Road) having been lost during the war.

We (my parents and older brother) shared the house with my maternal grandmother. The houses were simple three up three down, coal-fire heated, no bathroom and an outside toilet shared by all occupants. Virtually all houses in the street were shared in a similar way. The combination of high occupancy, cold and damp meant that being outside on the street, on a bomb site, in a back garden were all part of our normal days. There were no phones, no TV, very few cars.

It was a childhood of simple joy and community. Front doors really were open all day, babies in prams on the street, games in the street, neighbours all known to each other. School was a short walk away and our territory was not much further than our street. But the street was very much ‘owned’ by local tenants. There were even street on street rivalries at times.

I have no recall of anyone being spoken of as lonely. It was difficult to be alone anywhere so I suspect that there may have been issues of lack of privacy. That said it was a place recovering from a war and the spirit was of optimism and collective improvement.

The rebuilding of the estate must have started around 1960. The old terraces were replaced by a combination of new houses, maisonettes, low rise flats and towers. My parents and grandmother chose to move to Lund Point, numbers 135 and 133 so we shifted from living as a vertical family to a horizontal one. As kids we could let ourselves into my grandmother’s flat by reaching through her letterbox and flipping the door handle.

For us the change was all positive. We were a close family and remained so. Our large extended family all had very basic caravans on the Osea Campsite on the Blackwater Estuary, and most weekends from May to September were spent there. We were simultaneously townies and country kids, with all the nous of the streets plus the learned skills of tree climbing, birding, eel catching, sailing, swimming etc. No money but lots of community.

All of the above aside there were lots of concerns during the rebuilding about disconnection and loneliness. For many older people whose family had moved from the area, they now found themselves in a flat on their own. A hygienic, warm and maintained flat, but with very little daily contact with neighbours. The only time you saw neighbours would be while waiting for the lift.

For the working and the children this was not a big issue because their identities were also defined by work and schoolmates etc. For those out of work or no longer working it stripped away all outside identity. People’s territory went from being all the stuff outside their front door to nothing. From home and community to no-mans-land and isolation.

As if this was not enough it coincided with a unique era in the UK when TVs and telephones arrived in homes and car ownership started to escalate. Even corner shops began to close with the arrival of larger grocers/supermarkets. So within ten years we shifted from all life being on the local streets and outside of home to almost all being inside and away from any possibility of community interaction.

There was no custodianship of the landings for the flats in the way there was of the streets. On the streets people cleaned their front steps and swept their part of the street. In the flat everything outside your front door was ‘the council’s’ responsibility. Lifts and public areas became subject to minority bad behaviour in a way that couldn’t happen on local streets.

For new residents there was little opportunity to meet neighbours and parents at home with small children could find themselves detached from the kind of community their parents had taken for granted.

Photo courtesy of Sandra Fallows.