Bargepole has recently finished reading Margaret Forster’s ‘My Life In Houses’, a book that sort of tells her life story in terms of the places she lived – a very good read.
Where have you lived over the years – and was there a favourite?
My Life In Houses
by 61 Comments
Cripes. Many places I hung my hat. Favourites: a little house in Paris, listed monument, art deco frontage, cobbled street. A basement in Belsize Park. A cheesy hotel long-lease in LA (Roy Dotrice a neighbour). A cottage near Manosque. An apartment high above the Petchburi Road in Bangkok. And where I am now, in a house I planned out exactly and had built approximately by a swarm of pirates from Lao PDR. First place I ever lived that I didn’t feel the itch to be somewhere else. So much sky.
You lived next to Roy Dotrice? He’s a fuckin’ duuuuuude. I almost respect you.
I lived across the pool from him.
Not that anyone but myself finds this of interest, but I counted my homes last night in bed instead of sheep and got to twenty-six.
You’re usually in sheep?
I thought I’d covered myself pretty well. I didn’t type “counted my homes in bed”, see. because then some smartarse would have said …
But hey! How’s the noggin, Nigel?
Apart from the acute case of pedantry the head seems pretty well, HP – thank you for asking 🙂
Scan in a few months’ time will hopefully back this up.
Very glad to hear that Nigel.
Seconded. All the very best Nigel chum _/\_ 🙂 x
*waves happily at Rob and KFD*
Sounds like the pirates may have omitted to build a roof.
*snork*!
* graps Nigel in a manly hug and kisses him on the bonce *
Very nice, Rob, and your sentiment does you credit, but this is hardly the place for a public display of homoeroticism.
I’m a Hot Sex Druid Cat spreading the Cosmic Lurve to The Myriad Sundry in all forms Corporeal and Not, Honeychile… C’mere Saucy Baby ! x
I’m a bit shocked to hear that, Saucy. Could you do me a favour and lemme know where it is I should be going?
😀
I think in Rob’s case his steamy manlove avowal should have been appended to Nige’s comment, not interrupting a conversation about roofs between Bingo and myself. It’s a matter of form. But perhaps we need a dedicated homoeroticism thread? I leave it in your capable hands, Gary.
My hands are already chaffed and blistered just from the necessary research.
Ohhhhhh innee bollllld!
Sorry, wrong thread.
Or is it?
Agreed on the book, took it on face value, rather than some reviewer who suggested that she was snobbish about property and what houses mean. Favourite place – where I am now; small house in North London. If only people wouldn’t leave litter and take their effing trolleys back to the blasted supermarket. I am kind of attached to the place where I grew up; my parents felt ‘ownership’ of a place they never owned. It had an occasional damp problem, a bathroom larger then the kitchen and a lovely wood panelled dining room/lounge. Most eccentric; a mid sized concrete tower block in the Tokyo suburbs called ‘Brand New Besho’ with a unhinged born again Christian evangelist.
I’ve never really loved anywhere I’ve lived apart from my mum and dad’s place: an early Edwardian semi in Gloucester. It was built shortly after the demolition of a church and the pews ended up as its banisters and woodwork. And it’s very high-ceilinged and dark and cool in the summer. Not grand at all, but homely and nice, and not quite like anywhere else I’ve seen. I think it cost them 8 grand, the bastards.
Without earning ridiculous megabucks, people my age don’t get to live anywhere particularly special – especially not in the south and especially especially not the south east.
Eight grand. That’s what my parents paid for a three bedroom semi in Edgware in 1969. Today that house would be worth three quarters of a million. Pity they sold it in the early 70s and moved back up north.
Mine paid 3 grand for a similar house in North Harrow in the late 50s.
I hope it stayed in the family?
He downsized to a retirement flat in Northwood about 4 years ago as there was only him living there. Whilst he kept it tidy, there was no central heating and he only put the immersion heater on for a bath, boiling a kettle to wash in the sink etc. He was only the second owner of the house since the 30s and had to explain to potential purchasers that there was no boiler and never had been as he relied on storage heaters and a couple of gas fires.
He’s sitting on the balance of the sale for his old age (he’s 87 but says he hasn’t died yet and has no intention of doing so. He’ll probably outlive me and my brother.)
Oh, he didn’t get anything near £750k for his house although it was still a substantial sum.
I’ve only lived in four places, and I loved all but one.
I grew up in a wonderful old and big house in a residential suburb, on a small dead end street.
It had a big garden with terraces climbing up a hill leading into a small nature park behind our fence, a tall slope perfect for sledgeing in the winter at the back of the house (with marble steps beside it), a big gravel court where we played badminton etc, mysterious nooks and crannies everywhere (an old marble fountain turned into a flower bed, an old furnace that you could walk into, hidden paths in between bushes) and all sorts of trees and flowers etc.
Fruits and berries everywhere. One cherry tree grew from the middle terrace and I put a plank from the top terrace onto the fork of its trunk that we could walk on, straight into the tree to pick the cherries.
We practically lived outdoors all through summer as kids, and if we got tired of our wonderful garden we just climbed the fence and had more trees plus some big cliffs to climb.
The house itself was equally fantastic at first. Plenty of wonderful big and room-long storage wardrobes built under the sloping roofs on the top floor, perfect for secret club meetings and games, dress up clothes provided inside. A wonderful staircase perfect for neck-breaking acrobatics, a very old and strange bathroom that I used as my secret agent headquarters, a lovely veranda with coloured stained glass windows, lots of eccentric details.
Then, in the 70s, my parents wanted to modernize it. Today, they would probably have been publicly flogged for a renovation like that…
They tore out all of the beautiful old paned windows and put new ugly ones in, put up walls where none had been and tore down others, got rid of all of those storage wardrobes, re-built the staircase, took out all of the lovely stained glass windows and turned the veranda into a windowless hall with an extra toilet, tore out every eccentric old detail and put up ugly orange wallpaper and brown vinyl carpets just about everywhere.
To crown their achievment they clad the pastel green wooden house in some sort of ghastly white aluminium fronts (made to imitate wood, of course), thus turning a charming old house into an impersonal locker. One that you could seriously burn yourself on if you happened to lean against it in summertime…
But I really do love the flat I live in now the most. When I saw it the first (and only) time before I moved in, it was being renovated and everything had been torn out, the floors were covered in paper, the bathroom and kitchen were two empty holes and it was pitch black because they were still working on the electricity, but as soon as I stepped into the hallway I felt that I was home.
The flat is perfect, and the area is perfect. Very calm and peaceful, but the bustling city with everything you could ever want is just a minute away, there are big parks just minutes away, I can walk everywhere and people are laid-back.
Unless financial disaster strikes, I’ll never move again.
Childhood: Glasgow tenements, two of them. The first was a bit of a slum at the time, though now I’m told one of the most desirable addresses in the west end. The second is probably still the largest place where I have ever lived.
Teens: Horrible near-new build detached. In north Wales. I had the broom closet ‘third bedroom’ and hated the place. My parents moved to a lovely big Victorian terrace the week after I left for college (but at I knew they had moved. My sister came back from Durham at Christmas, surprised to find her key didn’t fit and even more surprised when complete strangers opened the door.)
The college years: House shares, about ten of them over three years, mainly in small terraced houses. I moved whenever we were burgled, or the guttering gave out and water ran down my walls. Something seemed to happen once every few months to make me move on.
Twenties: The bedsit years, and for me they lasted till I was 30. First a poky room and kitchen in an attic. I loved it for its isolation and the way the rain would hammer on the skylight windows. Then, at the other end of the country, a scruffy room and inadequate heating for its high ceilings, but with a glorious view across a valley which I sometimes still miss.
Finally: Moved again and could afford to rent a proper flat for the first time, with the luxury of a separate room for sleeping in! Ten months later I bought my first flat, where I still live more than 15 years later, by far the longest I have ever lived anywhere. Not just a bedroom, but a spare bedroom which I call the library (and I have lined one wall with bookcases, but it’s really where the shoes and coats live). In common with my other favourite places it has isolation when I need it, a green view from the front, and some generously sized rooms. I love it very much.
I never intended to stay in this flat so long. I assumed when I bought it that I would buy a small house a few years down the line, but then prices went through the roof and stayed there. When I bought the place where I am typing I was the assistant manager of a large bookshop, and on my single wage, which was significantly below the national average, I could afford a two bed flat. In the scheme of things that seems about right to me. The last time a two bed flat in my block sold it went for more than £145k. How on earth are young people ever meant to afford a place to live with prices for modest properties like that?
First house as a nipper was in Great Barr – I have a nostalgic view of the long sloping garden at the back. At the age of 6 moved to Kingshurst in the house that my mum and dad still live in now. First house when I got married was in Tamworth which I didn’t care for – modern build and characterless. Second house with first wife was in Polesworth – post ward semi with a long dining room that I liked. It was also close to a couple of good walks and had a village feel. In between those two I lived in Miami for 2 years in two separate apartments both of which were really nice.
With my lovely current wife we bought our first house together in 1998 that increased in value by 140 percent in 6 years. This allowed us to buy our current house in Lichfield in a rural location in what to me is a wonderful market town. This house is home – really happy here.
By incredible coincidence I am typing this in the house I was born in – really. I am visiting my parents in the North East of England, Darlington – a brief visit from my my now home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This is three bedroom semi detached “pre war” quintessentially English house. The rooms are too small, the kitchen tiny, a single bathroom with a separate toilet – but I of course adore it due to 54 years of memories. This weekend we retook a picture of me from my childhood trying to mimic a shot sitting on a garden step from 50 years earlier.
I walked back from the town center this evening – a walk I have taken so many times I am practically on auto pilot. It changes but it will always be the same…… I have lived in many other places – half a dozen in the UK – another 3 in the US and moving to a fourth next month. Michigan is now my home – I will be back there in a week or so – it’s where I want to be- but this is still HOME in ways that cannot be adequately described. I am feeling a little maudlin!
@DrewToo My home town, too, and I was born in a very, very similar house. It still has the separate toilet. And yes, it’s still HOME.
That town centre…I must have done that walk from the top of the hight street/North Road , along the high street (via the Queen Street arcade) to Grange Road so, so many times. Dressers, Boyes….:D
Ah, Darlo. I know it well. 🙂
I lived in Darlington (Hummersknott Avenue, if my memory is correct) when I was 3 for a couple of years.
My dad worked at the Patons factory.
Noooo! I lived over the road from Patons.
You and Drew were from the posho end of town, unlike prolier-than-thou me.
My favourite homes ?
A forest bivouac in Ancient India
Palatial Iron Age Hillfort in Dorset
Canterbury Cathedral
Top floor rooms in Belgravia during the Crimean Crisis
Brothel in Gold Rush San Francisco
My next Yurt
You are Thomas à Becket and I claim my five groats.
You peen peeking at my horsehair undercrackers, man ?
It’s a tough job…
On a humid night it sounds like a tropical thicket down there on account of the crotch cicadas.
I was wondering what that noise was. Bloody south-westerlies!
In China they are considered a delicacy. I have a product run under way.
‘Rob C’s Crunchee Crotch Cicadas’ (The Queen gets her gums round ’em !)
‘been’ – I say, Edit Facility what what ?
I was born by the river in a little tent. No, hang about that was some American chappie. Wherever I lay my hat that’s my home…erm. That was some other geezer too.
The only place I’ve lived that I truly loved was a shared ramshackle farmhouse in rural Wales. The house itself was very old with low beamed ceilings and an intermittent electricity supply but it’s location was a piece of bucolic heaven. Situated down a dirt track accessed from a country lane and surrounded by woodland and fields. A low hill gently towered to the rear from which one could watch the sun sink into the Irish Sea. A little stream ran through one of the woods to the north a prime spot for watching Kingfishers whilst feasting on the wild strawberries that grew profusely in the patches of dappled sunlight.
I was eighteen years old. In art school. Madly in love with a beautiful girl and free.
The past is a foreign country…
I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire
I use a cobra snake for a necktie
I got a brand new house on the roadside
Made from rattlesnake hide
I got a brand new chimney made on top
Made out of a human skull
Now come on take a walk with me, Arlene
And tell me, who do you love?
You know the bit near the start of Brassed Off where the two women are discussing the pit closure over the backyard wall? Well I lived for a very short while in a house on that street, a brick built two up two down, front door straight into the street, very rough area. On New Street (for that was it’s name), there was only me and a guy three doors down who had legitimate full time jobs – ie we paid tax and N.I. It was social housing provided by a housing association, whenever anyone moved there were people from the HA waiting for the last load to go onto the lorry then the doors and windows were all secured with metal grilles to prevent people breaking in to strip out all the wiring and copper piping to take to the local scrapyard. I lived there for 6 months in 93/94 while saving for the deposit for a house, I’d like to say it was the happiest time of my life but it was fucking horrible.
Since the age of three, over a period of getting on for fifty years, I have lived in a total of 11 houses. Every one has had an even numbered address. The odds of that are about 1000-1* (I think). Not hugely improbable, but still a bit karmic.
* Assuming I’ve never subconsciously favoured even-numbered houses, when renting/buying of course
Born and brought up in a cooncil house in Ponteland, then lit out for the bright lights.
Which manifested as house-shares in Limehouse and Tooting. I once worked out how many people I had shared these houses with over a 6 year period, 34. A good number.
Then a flat of my own in Lewisham, astonishingly situated a few yards away from Spike Milligans family home after the war (though he and they were long gone).
One has also lived for a short while in Beckenham.
Haven’t lived in any properties that are remarkable in themselves. But it’s all about the time you had there and the memories, and on that basis the childhood home – a bungalow – on Belfast Lough; the first house, a small two up two down, I bought with Mrs BB, and the house – an unremarkable Edwardian semi – we live in now and where our kids grew up are pretty damn precious.
The house I live in now is rather spiffing. It’s an old farmhouse and my bedroom is a trullo. What’s a trullo you ask? Look it up, ya lazy fat git, I reply.
Too many, a terraced house to begin with in S Wales valleys, was sold 10 yrs ago when my (English) mother died.
Various student accommodation in Liverpool. Then a shared flat in North London without central heating, 15 quid a week!
Two different flats over 15 years in Zurich, my first purchase in Bristol, in the house Eddie Shoestring lived in!
Than many places in Canada, now renting a 3 storey townhouse in suburban Ottawa, I don’t love it, but can walk to work, and it’s better when my daughter is here than a downtown pad, looking to buy soon probably.
My current flat is the first I have owned. It has a wall of books, a pile of music and the people I love. I have stayed in all kinds of flatshare squalor prior to this. Some of which I even have fond memories of. But frankly my new family are here, a lovely park is opposite and I’m a 30 minute cycle from my place of work. So I love it.
As mentioned above, I grew up in NW London and after a couple of house shares moved to Bletchley for 4 years or so. I didn’t feel settled there and moved to the Godalming area for about 10 years which is where I met my wife. This is where I felt happiest. We moved to the Sussex coast for more space but I often wonder if we should have made the effort to stay in Godalming. I intend to retire to Fiskado which is as close to paradise as I’ve found.
The house I’m in now is the first I’ve ever owned, right where Bristol shades into Gloucestershire. It’s an suburban end terrace and the one neighbour is a lovely elderly old lady who is also very deaf, which means I get to rock out a lot more than I might otherwise.
Other notable places include a flat in Plymouth with what I swear was one of the best views in the country – it was right up on the Hoe (Elliott Terrace for any janners reading this (@vulpes-vulpes?)) with a massive lounge looking right out over the Sound. It was six flights up with no stairs, and it had a tiny bathroom and the occasional mouse but it didn’t matter. I’ve also lived in a converted biscuit factory in Cardiff that had random iron pillars throughout the building, and in the same Tokyo apartment block as the actress Rinko Kikuchi.
Through my 20s, I had a consistent pattern of living in 3-bedroom Victorian terraces within walking distance of a city centre – Nottingham, Chester, Leicester, two in Melbourne and back in Chester again. Lots of good reasons why such a location worked so well at that age. The gold rush houses in Melbourne had a special grace that confounded the lazy assumptions of so many sneering English acquaintances of the time. Walking daily into town over the Olde Dee Bridge and along the city walls gave me a joy for which I was grateful in my Chester days.
Then at 32, without it being part of a deliberate plan, I moved into the country, to an estate cottage round the back of the big house in a park; 21 years later I still live in an estate cottage round the back of a (different) big house in a park. I’ve not owned them, but these are the houses that have felt most like home. Home now is cold, damp, draughty, but individual, which I appreciate. Even in the lousiest weather, I never feel hemmed in out in the countryside. And as I cycle home down the avenue of trees on the drive to the big house, it is like escape to a secure personal world, with all my troubles locked out by a door closing behind me. If it’s night and I surprise the badger who snuffles and snorts off to the cover of the woods, my day is complete.
Apart from now, in a house that the purchase of which accelerated my last divorce, near bankrupting me by that combination, becoming an overlarge hovel I lived in alone with 2 small dogs, and that now is an astonishingly transformed home I love, my happiest was a tiny terrace, solely my own, for about 3 years before said marriage. 1 and 1/2 bedrooms, 1 room downstairs and a kitchen. Having said, I prefer Lichfield to Solihull, the latter being where I lived for 20 years, as soon as I could afford to move out of hospital accommodation. At a age where retirement and downsizing beckon, locations keep jumping at me, Whitby and the Yorkshire coast, or the Northumbria of Alnwick and Alnmouth, Shropshire villages like Much Wenlock. Or sticking round here. My needs are simple. A decent pub for leisurely lunches, a shop to prevent the age old country angst of “did you get the milk?”, broadband and a a strong postman.
Oh yes, watch out for the broadband. We’re still on solid fuel broadband round here, the gas never having reached beyond the last houses of the town.
Mrs Moose is from that bit of Northumberland. It’s ace.
But considering the cost of living up there it bloody ought to be.
I make it 20 in 4 different countries. That said the 10 years in my current address is the longest of my adult life.
Probably nicest during the travel years was a very large apartment overlooking the Vosges in a posh bit of Strasbourg near the Parc de l’Orangerie.
Quirkiest: a school house in Mykonos. Classroom, kitchen, bathroom and an office with a fold-out bed. On Saturday mornings, my students would kick me out of one and into another via the other two.
Weirdest: Kensington Gardens in Brighton, student years. My bedroom shared one wall with the funeral parlour next door, and another with a spooky disused staircase which had a locked door at the bottom and was bricked up at the top. The original Body Shop was two doors along, but I think the name was a coincidence.
Favourite: A gloriously impractical, perpetually freezing half-pint cottage, with no space, gardens full of climbing things that threaten to overwhelm it if you turn your back on them for even a moment, and mad wildlife that seems to think it owns the place. Which it doesn’t. We do.