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

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. 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 style. If you, with your 21st century norms, could be transported back to around 1911 to any one of the roads on this or any one of those typical estates, 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 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 photo above right is from 1911 and shows my mother with her two brothers outside the house where she grew up, 116 Lopen Road, Edmonton. The next photo shows a wide-angle view of Warwick Road, and, for comparison purposes, the next-but-one shows a fairly recent photo of Cheddington Road. The most striking difference 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 there in adjacent roads.

In 1911 the houses on the estate were rented, not bought. (They started being sold off in the late 1950s or early 1960s.) In 1911 the families living on the estate were not well off. They made-do and mended, as the saying goes, but they were certainly not destitute. They were, after all, living in new, state-of-the art housing. They had front and back gardens and lavatories that flushed - quite something for the period!

There was money for children to go to 'Saturday morning pictures' (the children's cinema) although not for school holidays away. Nor did the families go hungry. Food was wholesome and freshly prepared from basic ingredients although the variety was limited. Shops were nearby, as was the local Silver Street School. Children were adequately clothed, although as often as not with mended hand-me-downs or home-made clothes which were so much the norm as to be of no significance.

The menfolk were in jobs of types that have largely disappeared today. The 1911 census for the estate shows neither unskilled straight labourers nor white collar workers. Rather, it shows men in between the two: blue collar workers working in trades which required levels of experience and responsibility. My mother’s father was, at various stages of his life, an ambulance driver and a labour master at the Edmonton workhouse; and the man next door spent his working life painting the thin lines which were, for some reason, regarded as a requirement along the centre-backs of the mudguards of bicycles.

The womenfolk took a pride in how they kept their houses and - indeed - the length of pavement outside their houses. They worked hard; these families did not have paid help in the house.

This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.