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Most Nottstalgians will have some memory of life in the backyards of terraced houses - in amongst the sheds, clothes lines, bins, and toilets. These backyards are in the Meadows in the early 50s.  Someone might even recognise their own washing. 

 

The car is on Tealby Terrace with Glebe Street at the top.

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The diagonal road from the left to top centre is Kirkby Street, and just appearing on the right is Agnes Street.

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The road going up the left is Lammas Street, with Kirke White Street East just in the lower left corner.

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TBC...

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The houses on Tealby Terrace have an unusual roof line, can't say that I can recall seeing anything similar anywhere else. Wonder if it was peculiar to just those or were there other terraces dahn Medders with the same construction?

 

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That sort of roofline is actually fairly common, Commo. Lots of houses in the Meadows had three storeys on the front and two storeys on the back so the rear roof slope is much steeper. I see a lot had a skylight in the rear slope. Our house was like that.

 

I think what was universal in all those backs were the dark grey floor bricks with the diamond chequered pattern. 

   

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I didn't live in a terraced house but spent a lot of my spare time during primary school years round at my best friend's house, 7 Hazelwood Road. Those houses were terraced. No one ever used their front door so I always went round the back, up an alleyway between numbers 11 and 13. I will never forget the ringing, echoing sound my feet made on those very same grey bricks between the two gable ends before I turned left at the end and passed the gates of 11 and 9 before reaching number 7.

 

There was a tiny little yard, paved with similar bricks, no garden. Outside loo which I would never use, a coal store and a brick wall between 7 and 9 where my friend's auntie lived. The family had lived at number 7 since it was built. Apart from the loo, I loved it!

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The memories coming flooding back from my childhood on Bathley street (Bayford cottages),thanks for the memory jog CT

 

Rog

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Good memories of our old house on Hodgkinson street, Netherfield.  The door from the front room opened straight onto the street.  The back door was reached by an entry in the row and then left or right.  Each house had a paved back yard then a small postage sized garden beyond that.  Good for a kid to play in, but not a lot of use for anything else except maybe a tiny lawn or a few flowers.

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Lived in a terrace house, but our backyard was shared by 6 other house's it was a large yard. To get to our back we had to go though an entry, great when in winter you had to say good night to your boy friend. Toilets were at the end of your part of yard, all the house's had there own,  In winter most of the time they froze, and you had to fetch a bucket of hot water to thaw the toilet out. Don't for get all the house's had metal guttering and icicle's would hang off the gutter's you needed a snowball to knock the icicle off, then you would eat it like a lolly (how many germ's would their be in the icicle) answer on a post card please. When snow melted and slipped off the roof you did not want to be standing underneath it. Monday was wash day and the lines went all the way across the yards, getting down to your house was like going though a maze. Every other day we used to take the lines and use for our skipping rope.

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I remember my grandma living in a terraced house with an entry every two houses . This meant that the yard was shared  and at the bottom of it were the coal houses and outside loos. Winter was not the time to want to go to the library as my grandad called it, although his trick of lighting a candle and putting an upturned clay plant pot over it stopped things freezing up. The entry ceiling was always covered in flaking paint, although I did manage to clear a lot of it with my toy helicopter, the one that you launched with a serrated pull. The other problem was that I covered all and sundries with the aforesaid flaky paint so that led to the helicopter being grounded for a while. Happy days.

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The centre photo interested me the most, because it showed a line of air-raid shelters. The common above-ground street and school type - no windows, of course.

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My favourite back yard, of course, was the one behind number 4 Garden Street. To me, as a child, it seemed enormous and couldn't be accessed by anyone other than the occupants or the chap who used some of the outbuildings as storage space for his painting and decorating business.

 

The entire yard was either cobbled or had the grey bricks laid in rows. There was no soil but uncle George had a large greenhouse in the centre where tomatoes and flowers flourished in season. Round the side nearest the house were various outbuildings which had fallen out of use and right down at the bottom was a wc. I recall a channel in the grey bricks near there which ran off to a drain. There was no loo in the house and no electric light in the outside wc. I also recall a large tin bath hanging outside the back door. No bathroom in the house either!

 

All disappeared many years ago but, oddly enough, I still dream about that house and its back yard not infrequently so it obviously made a deep rooted impression on me!

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1 hour ago, Chulla said:

The centre photo interested me the most, because it showed a line of air-raid shelters. The common above-ground street and school type - no windows, of course.

 

That explains it !   I'd noticed the feature but just assumed they were some kind of shed.

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Interesting, I suppose shelters had to be shoe-horned in any available space. In between Turney St and Bathley St there were some where we used to play, partially buried but I seem to remember more substantial than the normal Anderson type. Plantfit might remember them.

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There was a shelter on Hawthorne Street at the top of our yard, a brick building with offset doorways so that they were open but you couldn't see inside. I suppose that was to keep lights from showing if people had lamps or candles. As I was a total wimp I never went inside but it certainly smelt funny. I know my mam wouldn't go in it even if there was a raid warning.

I remember it being knocked down by a swinging iron ball on the end of the arm of a crane.

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According to my mother, her father constructed an Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden of the house on Bobbers Mill Road. Of course, by the time I came along, it was long gone and a flower bed had taken its place. I'd got it into my head that there was some sort of wartime cavern under the soil which was where they'd all trooped down to in the middle of the night during wartime so, one summer when I was about 8, I spent weeks digging it up. All I found were pieces of what looked like concrete or stucco among the soil! Very disappointing! What I expected to find I don't really know!

 

One of our favourite pastimes as children was digging in the garden for bits of pottery! We found lots. Wonder where it all came from?

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Our gardens on old Bestwood estate were massive,our garden on Andover rd was about 40x20 yards,and growing up there was terrific, at different times it was Wembley stadium and Trent bridge cricket ground,

Dad was no gardener so it was left to me and my mates to do as we pleased,

Never found any sign of an Airaid shelter,though we made one ourselves, it was about 8 feet deep and wide enough to put an old table down it and six of us to sit round,we had a ladder to get in and out,we covered it with grass sods,

Many happy hours spent down there,we also found lots of Pottery of different colours, plus many old clay pipes,still wonder how they came about,

Dad made us fill it in after about 2years, he caught us taking girls in it, lol,

Still remember the names of all of em, Harry Fewkes,Ernest Scott,Pete and Nev Olpin,Charley and Mick Tacey,(saw mick,in Bulwell yesterday) and the main girl was Barbara Shepherd,  happy childhood days,

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Yes, I was wondering where you dumped the soil from such an excavation. The pit would have been deeper than most graves in those days when 5 were buried in a vertical column, as are some of my relatives in Northern Cemetery. You must have needed to shore it up with something to stop it collapsing?

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We spread the soil around the garden,and for a roof we had sheets of corrugated iron,which we covered with the grass sods,i dont recall any shoring up,,,,,anyway I've lived to tell the tale

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Dad's family lived at 12 Chapel Street in Beeston through the war years. Their back yard contained a well which was capped but meant that they couldn't have an Anderson shelter there. 12 Chapel Street and the surrounding cottages were very old. Georgian or earlier, some of them. All had outdoor privies, fuel stores and washing lines in their back yards. Not a trace of any of it remains.

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Wow, CT! Where did you find that? The houses were around 10 years old then and I can even see the greenhouse belonging to Tom Cottee who lived at 8 Chadwick Road, the property that backed onto 190! The Chadwick Road houses were brand new then. They cost £500 each, beyond my grandmother's grasp though she would dearly have liked one but they were much smaller than the houses on Bobbers Mill Road.

 

There were no Sparrows living at 190 in the 30s. The first tenants were my maternal grandparents, Louis and Edith Saunt. The houses were difficult to let due to the high rent.

 

Brilliant photo!

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