Comments on: A Brief History Of Change

By: Cherub

Cherub — Mon, 17 May 2021 16:39:51 +0000

It’s always fascinating to read how rural places merged together to become parts of towns and cities. My mother was from one of a small collection of mining villages on the east coast of Scotland, it eventually became part of a large industrial town in the early 1930s. When I see photos of how it was before then it looked quite impoverished. It’s now a historic village on a coastal path for walkers as it has buildings dating back to the 14th century and was famous for salt mining.

I’ve been very lucky to live in a small city in Switzerland for the past 5 years, again made up of what was farmland and rural villages. My district is called Breite which I believe is Swiss German for meadow. The verges and green spaces are planted out with meadow flowers every year to keep that feel and it’s a very pretty place close to the Rhein.

By: Di Corry

Di Corry — Mon, 17 May 2021 14:04:50 +0000

Hard to imagine the Stepney and Bow I know as once being rural!
The London I grew up in and loved is being turned into a Developers playground.
Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and Hackney are just few of the places that will be unrecognisable before long…..not forgetting Spitalfields and Norton Folgate. But life goes on …….

By: Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson — Mon, 17 May 2021 13:13:58 +0000

I enjoyed this piece very much. It is a period of London history in which most of my great grandparents left their working class lives in the countryside and moved into East London, presumably because, whereas the rural economy was in decline, the rapidly growing metropolis offered the prospect of employment. The next generation had prospered to the extent that they were able to move to the outer suburbs, buy their own properties and build the lower middle classes from the ground up.

My grandmother was one of those “lady typists” who took over from the generations of male clerks. Here is a fragment of a brief memoir she wrote, shortly before her death in the 1980s, describing her experience as an office worker in Edwardian London.

“I Ethel S Johnson met Walter Johnson at the Hearts of Oak Benefit Society in Euston Road, nearly opposite St Pancras LMS station. The Insurance Act had just started and the H. of Oak was in chaos as all letters had been hand written and copied on a file of interleaved carbon and the men there were horrified to see an army of girls and typewriters invade their domain (we were all fixed up in the Boardroom temporarily) and did they lead us a dance, I was in charge (on account of “age and deportment”)”

By: Pauline Taylor

Pauline Taylor — Mon, 17 May 2021 10:18:43 +0000

What has struck me in all the years that I have been researching family history is the contrast between the Victorian lifestyles of my fathers family and my mother’s.. My paternal grandmother’s history is all in London from the 16th century whilst my mother’s is all completely rural and I doubt very much whether her parents ever went to London. Those who lived in London would have seen all the changes that Gilliam mentions but the rural families lived much as their ancestors had lived with none of the modern ‘improvements whatsoever until the arrival of the railway in the nearest town and then later on, early cars and motor buses in the 1920s. Electricity and gas were unknown, no-one had a telephone and very few had indoor plumbing. Things were so different and London must have seemed like a whole new world to them.
My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, reversed the exodus from the country to London by moving out from Clapton to a village on the border between Essex and Suffolk in 1910. Thinking about it now I cannot begin to imagine what a culture shock it must have been for my grandmother who had grown up in a very comfortable home with all the then mod cons to suddenly find herself living in a small cottage with earth and brick floors, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no telephone and no gas or electricity, but she said she had never been so happy. Perhaps there is a lesson for us all in that.

By: Sally

Sally — Mon, 17 May 2021 09:01:48 +0000

What a fascinating read, thank you very much for posting.

By: Jill Wilson

Jill Wilson — Mon, 17 May 2021 07:19:30 +0000

A friend of mine recently showed me a fascinating map he has got of London which was drawn just before the coming of the railways and as Gillian points out it is amazing to see how small London still was then, and to imagine the phenomenal growth and change that London would go through in the next eighty years.

Definitely one of the most fascinating periods in history, especially for our capital city.