A typical Victorian housing estate as it was in the early 1900s

Based on childhood recollections of working class family life in north London in Edwardian times.

My mother's family lived on a housing estate which was typical of the Victorian terraced housing that popped up in previously rural areas towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th. The estate happened to be the large Huxley Estate in Edmonton [now reassigned as Enfield] on the northern outskirts of London.

The houses were small, compact and terraced. There were of course larger Victorian and Edwardian houses, but they tended to be individual or in small blocks, like my father's family home in Pymmes Villas.

How the estate grew

On the Huxley Estate building started in the late 1800s and went on into the early 1900s.

Warwick Road and Sheldon Road were the first roads to be built. They are shown on the 1894 Ordnance Survey map of the area which makes them genuinely Victorian.

The house where my mother grew up was built a few years later and was therefore Edwardian, but was in the same general style. The photo on the right is from 1911 and shows my mother there with her two brothers. The address was 116 Lopen Road, Edmonton.

If you, with your 21st century norms, could be transported back to around 1911 to any one of the roads on this estate or any other such typical estate, you would be hard pushed to tell the difference between them. Not that the residents of the time would have seen things this way: As each new road was built, the insides of the houses improved in facilities and finish. The houses in the newer roads were offered to the better-off existing tenants or their children. So a natural gradation in quality and social class took place across the estate. Cheddington Road was either the last or one of the last to be build and was considered more upmarket.

The most striking difference between the early 1900s photo of Warwick Road and the more recent one on the left of Cheddington Road is the number of cars - although, of course, the roads have moved with the times in various other ways too.

I have not visited the estate since I was a child, but I do remember that there were broadly similar Victorian-style terraces in adjacent roads.

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This website Join me in the 1900s is a contribution to the social history of everyday life in early to mid 20th century Britain, seen through personal recollections and illustrations, with the emphasis on what it was like to live in those times. It is © Pat Cryer.