1. Growing up on Greencroft Street

 

Greencroft Street, decorated for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977

 

The avenue on the Greencroft in Autumn 2010

Photo: Pam Wall

Ken Edwards has lived in this area of Salisbury for all but a few years of his life. Here are some of his early memories, which reflect life in the Project area before and during the construction of the Ring Road.

Ken was born in 1944 and grew up in Greencroft Street.

“As a child we used to think it was quite a big house, but having seen it recently I wondered how we all lived in there, it was quite a small house really. A small terrace house.

Mother used to boil all the clothes up ‘cos we had a mangle. She used to do everything in the kitchen. Mondays used to be wash days. They used to do all the cooking, most of the cakes and everything else was cooked, and they’d have a good cook up even though it was after Sunday lunch; you had that on a Monday and then a bit more of it on the Tuesday and the soup on the Thursday. But yes it was hard work for the mothers in those days I think because they always seemed to be working in the kitchen or cleaning the house. We didn’t even have a bathroom we used to have to bring a tin bath in, in front the fire.

In the big attic room, which was a very large room, we all used to play and I had the stage up there and we used to do sort of plays with the other children in the street.

You didn’t lock your doors or anything else and people used to come in, even at nights. Sometimes the policeman would knock on your door and say, ‘Your door’s open. Please shut it.’ In those days everybody knew the local policeman.”

Read about other memories of Greencroft Street here.

Life for children in the area revolved around the Greencroft:

“We used to play in the street a lot, we used to play cricket ‘n football, ‘opscotch… We used to have these little carts……which we used to hare around the streets on and up the Greencroft ….. whole gangs of us. there was about twenty of us I s’pose in the end used to live in the street, in Greencroft Street, St. Edmund’s Church Street . There’s friends of mine.. I could look out my bedroom window on Greencroft Street and look across Roles’ builder’s yard and see their bedroom window, so wave goodnight and went to bed.

Big Mrs. Hayter was a big fat lady, and they had lot of ‘merican relatives used to come over and we used to have celebrations on the Greencroft with them, an’ picnics and tables out ‘n parties on the Greencroft with those. We had quite a few parties, celebrations for all sort of things. We used to go up further up, Barley Mow used to be a sort of hub of the street …. An’ we also have a lot of parties further on up in Nelson Morris’s yard there, where they used to kill the horses an’ sell dog meat, and they had a big yard and stables there. We used to have parties ‘n they did a lot for the street they did”.

There are several pages about the Greencroft on this site. Click here to reach them.