Lens Artist Challenge #336: Back Home

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It is now just a stretch of green, the houses are gone. There were two squares with houses in East London, an area where the cockneys lived. The houses were built in 1884 but they are no more. It was where I grew up. My grandfather lived on the ground floor, mum, dad and me on the second floor. We had three rooms, but it was back in the old days. My mum, her brother and two sisters also grew up in the house on this land. It was still standing after two world wars, during which the bombs were falling everywhere, but not on our street. In the garden was a shelter where mum slept during the war years with her mother, father and sisters. The men were all in the army for five years fighting in other countries.

What is now left is a building, the Queen Adelaide, a home for nurses to sleep working at the Bethnal Green hospital in the area. I remember the building from my chidhood. Yes the area was know as Bethnal Green, for me it is still Bethnal Green but with the growth of London over the years it was renamed Tower Hamlets, being near the Tower of London. This photo was from the seventies, but today it is a little park. I have been living in Switzerland for the past 56 years with my Swiss husband, but would travel to London most years to visit my family.

It seems that a tree is also still growing there, probably the remainder from a small back garden which the houses all had.

Lens Artist Challenge #336: Back Home

18 thoughts on “Lens Artist Challenge #336: Back Home”

    • Glad to oblige. I could have written a lot more, would almost fill a booik. We were poor in comparison to today. Dad worked in a factory and mum also, but we had our family. Of course through the years everything got better, but the memories are preserved.

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  4. A wonderful choice with your history, the house and green. Do you ever go back nowadays? Thank you for sharing this – I know the feeling from having lost the place where I grew up.

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    • When my dad was still alive I would return to see him once a year, However, at the age of 100 he passed away and that was my last visit. In the meanwhile I was diagnosed with MS which is a progressive illness, with no cure. I am perhaps not so badly affected and not yet in a wheelchair, but have mobile difficulties and my travelling days for such long distances are over.

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      • 100 years is a long life. Something to be grateful for. I guess we all have to accept that with age we will not be able to do the same things we used to do. Sometimes it is difficult, but to have a good life we must. We too find it difficult to travel long flights and long car rides. But we both live in beautiful countries – especially you – so staying at home is not that bad!

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    • So true. I visited three schools and two no longer exist. The third has become a boys only school. Our street was doomed for many years although there was so much to repair in London after the war, that it was not No. 1 on list. Eventually it was destroyed, disappeared, just a memory.

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