50 years ago | Bradley Lane, Standish, UK | ??th ?March 1974

Fifty years ago, I moved into our first family home: 161 Bradley Lane, Standish, part of the brand new development on land adjacent to Broomfield House. For fairly obvious reasons, I can’t be sure of the date but looking at the budding branches on the tree at the top of the still photograph below, I’m going to presume it was some time in March.

With the houses still being built by the time I was born, it meant that my first few months were spent living with my parents in my grandparents’ spare room at 11 Rectory Lane, Standish, next door to the Rectory.  Recently, we had some old cine reels digitised and we found two short clips of the area where these houses stand, before and after building had started. The bungalow shown at the far end of the new estate was the home of Horace and Hilda Barker, my great-grandparents, “Nana” and “Pop”.

By early 1974, the new houses on Bradley Lane and Ormsby Close were almost ready to be occupied. Our house comprised a stable yard with about a dozen stables and small paddock and it’s where I grew up for the next seven and a half years.

Coincidentally, thirty years later, something very similar happened for the first few months after we became parents, initially at Helen’s Mum’s and then at my Mum and Dad’s, while we were building our first family home.