History of Places You've Lived
 

Start off with our first purchased House... in Beddington, Surrey. 82 Guy Road next to the River Wandle and off of Beddington Lane a truly pleasant place to live at one time, seems strange now they have put up railings to stop you going in it, accident wise or pleasure wise..both for new safety laws...
Here is the River way way back even before I was thought of...
Very Surprised the wiki web page on Beddington has no mention of the River Wandle..without it, how would transportation of goods have taken place, of course the Mills would never had been built there without water flowing...
https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...=175&crop=fill

also there is a huge amount of photos articles etc on the Wandle River to see, but the painting site I chose as lots of people like also looking at artworks....

https://friendsofhoneywood.co.uk/painted-wandle.html

The Mill I worked in is now called Wandle Mills but originally named Beddington Mills.
The Mill House, building next right from the Mills was originally called the Mill House.

The link is there for any interest in the History of the Place...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beddington

Married in that Beddington Church in 1967..
My late Dad and moi..
https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...=175&crop=fill..

:wavey:

Nice! I love the english country side. So beautiful :love:

I've been all over the south coast from Lands end to Dover, but not so much the rest of the country.. just a canal boat trip somewhere close to London with my family in the mid-90s.

I lived in a small town near Yosemite called Mariposa for about seven years as a kid. Definitely the most beautiful place I ever lived, with rolling foothills, oaks galore, creeks, rivers, massive granite faces, and all of that good stuff. In the mornings, you can find a vista to see the tule fog hanging over the central valley like an ocean. I'm not sure where this photo was taken, but it looks a lot like this:

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/c...eg?format=500w

We were squatting in a trailer on somebody's large property (I didn't know that as a kid), keeping warm with a wood burning stove and fallen trees nearby. We never had to cut any down. There was a massive granite boulder/hill that was a couple of miles wide that I loved to climb on in addition to the smaller boulders lying all around. I feel like you have to be crazy to not love nature, but living there definitely cemented that appreciation for me. I also think it pushed me toward academia because with everything so spread out, playdates were hard to pull off, so school was pretty much the only time you had to kick it with the boys and I'd look forward to going.

Mariposa today is mainly a stopping off point for people on their way to Yosemite. When I was living there, an arsonist set off a series of fires that destroyed a good deal of the county. There are always fires in California, but it was the worst they'd experienced since the sixties. The 2018 fire season (year of the Camp Fire) topped it as the most destructive in county history. We were at school when they evacuated it and you could see the flames on the top of a hill almost a mile away from the campus. We also lived there during the Ferguson landslide that blocked the highway between the town and Yosemite for months. It was a huge deal for the townspeople, I remember sharing my lunch with my friend for a few weeks because his family was having trouble getting enough food and all assistance resources were running dry. They moved before it was cleared up.

Driving into the town, you can see a neon green patch of land on one of the taller hills that stands out from the forest surrounding it. In the 60s, the government claimed the plot of land from the county, saying they would use it to test New and Improved Fertilizers for the Brave New World or some ****. Locals think they were testing weapons of agricultural terrorism.

The town has a massive KKK presence. I think there were two black families in the town and one of the girls was in my grade at school. She was blind in one eye because a man at her church threw bleach in her face as a toddler. This was the era of colour blindness as a way to ignore racism, so I didn't make the race connection when I learned about it, I just thought that it was a crazy thing that happened to her. My middle school principal wore blackface on Halloween, which most of the school found hilarious. There was a thriving nazi punk scene, so growing up I thought that people just got swastika tattoos to be provocative like they would a mohawk. I left partway through my freshman year of high school and wonder all the time how differently things would've panned out if I stayed there. There were some BLM demonstrators in the town last year, so maybe the internet is aiding a shift in the youth there. I hope so.

Mariposa was originally a mining town, and the earliest settlers pillaged and raped the local Native American villages until the majority of the tribes agreed to a treaty to end the slaughter. The Ahwahneechees and Chowchillas refused to submit and the settlers waged the Mariposa War on them. The miners indiscriminately killed Native Americans in the area, so many of those in the tribes who signed peace treaties were murdered in the attacks. The miner militias got assistance from the governor, and eventually the Ahwahneechees and Chowchillas were exiled to the barren desert tract that is the Chowchilla reserve (they were the first to assimilate to subjugation, so they received the honourific title). The touristy spots mostly focus on the gold part and an unverified association with John Muir. If you go panning in a creek, you can still find some gold! How fun!

I've also lived in Phoenix area Arizona, Southern California, and the California central valley. Los Angeles' air is gross in the summer but it's been my favourite place to live so far because there's so much cool **** and people to do. There's plenty of history y'all can look into on that because I went on for longer than I expected about Mariposa. Chinatown and Inside the Mind of Watts are good 20th century perspectives.

^That's quite dark, Frown :O Interesting, though.

When I joined up on MB, I'm pretty sure I was living in Longyearbyen, a town of about 2500-3000ish people in the high arctic on the island Spitsbergen which is part of the Svalbard archipelago.. phew.

Since it's in the high arctic, you have polar bears, glaciers, no trees and either you have the sun up 24/7 during the summer months or its just dark through the winter months. The transition periods, spring and autumn, feel very short.

When I joined MB, it was winter and I was living alone in this big barrack. Every day, I went to uni to work in the biology lab, usually without meeting anyone because both students and staff had moved back to the mainland for the coming yule tide. I lived like that for about two weeks. I would listen to music and occasionally get drunk by myself on fine whiskey. I needed some human interaction, so joined up here.

Svalbard was a haven for whaling back in the day and there were boats and settlements from various countries. As whaling died down, people moved out, but then coal mining became a thing. Coal mining supported three bigger settlements, Longyearbyen, Pyramiden and Barentsburg with the latter two being under russian control (although Norway rule over Svalbard according to the Svalbard treaty). Many if not most of the coal miners working in Pyramiden died in a plane crash in the 90s and since then, it's been a ghost town, so now there's basically Longyearbyen and Barentsburg left.

Today, the "Big Norwegian" coal company is shutting down their operations on Svalbard which makes the future of Longyearbyen more than a little uncertain. There's a tourism trade up there which is what I believe most people there hope will help save Longyearbyen from becoming another ghost town like Pyramiden.

Some parts of the year, Longyearbyen might look like this:

https://www.thonhotels.com/globalass...estinasjon.jpg

that's fascinating. I've always had an obsession with small polar settlements and what it's like to live there so I'd love to hear more about it.
the mariposa story is beautiful too.

As for me, I was born in Amsterdam, lived there as a small child and uni student. The first house was one floor in a beautiful house around the corner of the old Heineken factory, idk how my mom found that for cheap.
For most of my childhood I grew up in a village close to Amsterdam, within cycling distance, so a suburb by international standards. It's typical pretty Dutch village in a polder landscape, there are at least 5 windmills in a 5km radius. This looks similar to my village:
https://mapio.net/images-p/63089864.jpg
It's a boring place to grow up though. In the Dutch golden age the area became a place for rich people to build country homes near the city and settle, and that's still what it is today really. I don't know much else about its history.

Nice, Marie :) It looks beautiful and I like the little gardens bordering the canal.

I had a girlfriend in The Hague some 15-20 years ago and I would visit her regularly, several times a year, so.. I've spent some time in Netherlands, also Amsterdam. Something which is a little weird is that since it's a flat country, you don't see much landscape beyond the street you're standing in. Coming from a hilly country, it's a thing I immediately noticed.

That aside, I really like Netherlands, especially Amsterdam and the snack foods, particularly french fries with satay sauce and mayonnaise. There's also a sandwich spread I miss which has been hard to identify, but we bought it at supermarkets. It seemed like ground meat mixed with spices so it was kinda orange in colour? And we got it in clear plastic containers. There's nothing quite like it here, so it stands out in my memory :)

cool! the spread you mean is filet Americain I think. It's pretty good, I had no idea it's not much of an international thing

Thanks, that's it! Last time I had it was in 2005 and I still think about it :love:

(0 - 9 months old) Bergen county NJ ->
(9 months - 8 yrs old) West Palm, FL ->
(8 - 9 yrs old) Colchester, VT ->
(9 - 11 yrs old) West Palm, FL ->
(11 - 12 yrs old) Statesville, NC ->
(12 - 13 yrs old) Lake worth, FL ->
(13 - 14 yrs old) Statesville, NC ->
(14 - 19 yrs old) Lake worth, FL ->
(19 - 20 yrs old) Pawtucket, RI ->
(20 - 24 yrs old) Lake worth, FL->
(~7 yrs) Statesville, NC ->
(~2 yrs) Greensboro, NC ->
(Currently 34 yrs old) Statesville, NC

reminds me of east of Eden

WOW.....feel like these places are something from another world..except the Netherlands of course.that is very typical European to me..having previously been viewing the Explore America Official small towns and cities Thread that is what made me start this one I guess...

Croydon just a stones throw from Beddington but very different as an Established Town it was already very built up....
Remember the Elephants Marching almost, though the town...
One-off circus events may well have been held in Croydon but, as far as I am aware, there was never a regular event.
Here is the
Elephants walking around the Lombard Roundabout in the 1960's
https://i2-prod.croydonadvertiser.co...phants1PNG.png

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...=175&crop=fill
..Grants...One of Three large department stores within a stones throw from each other that were full of' in the main' goods we could not afford...but we visited all three..Allders and Kennards where the other two stores, Kennards with their Arcade was like a Magical place to be...
My late Dad talked of the zoo next to Kennards way back but in my child years we had pony rides in the Arcade and all kinds of stalls selling cheap wares..Xmas Grotto was our of this world..as a child...
When Cheetahs Dined in Croydon
Croydon was a good place in the 60's but to me it is the pits now...they are still to this day feeding the town with new Millions of £..



There is a link that shows how it went over the years..down and down even David Bowie's comments...
David Bowie wanted to summarise all he found dreary, drab and stifling, there was only one place he could turn. “It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from,” he told Q magazine in 1999. “I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about something: ‘God, it’s so *ucking Croydon.’

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...the-last-laugh

I had moved away to the South Coast.. Bexhill on Sea in 2000...pleased to get away from the area by then...the riots of 2011 just viewed that on the TV
...not just in Croydon either as the real cause was the Police had shot dead Mark Dugan in North London a mixed race young male his parents where mixed Irish and African Caribbean descendants... 2019 the final conclusion the Police were innocent.....of course, it was always going to end in tears for the families and friends..
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incomin...y-28875642.jpg

Trying to think of anything good about Croydon now...can't...but certainly some unforgettable memories....

Now tell the history of all those places.

Maybe later

London has several small rivers that feed into the Thames, but like a lot of London's geographical features, they are difficult to spot because of the wall-to-wall urbanisation. Here's one river, treated very ignominiously in a huge pipe that has been excavated all around so that everyone can see its ugly underbelly. If you were a river, how would that make you feel?


So the Wandle, that Dianne mentions is lucky: it's visible and even accessible in parts with bits of parkland, or "common" as they are called in London (=common ownership= public land) for some bits of its short journey to the Thames. Here’s a map of the river, and though it doesn’t have a scale, I’m guessing the river is about 7 miles long. Dianne mentions Beddington, near the source, to the south, while I spent my early life to the north, in Wandsworth (named of course after the mighty torrent that is The Wandle!)


Alas, the blue of the map is deceptive; by the time it got to Wandsworth, the stream looked more like a cup of black coffee left over from last night.

The first time I heard how Thames was supposed to be pronounced I was like no that is wrong. The English are just snooty rednecks who don't know how to talk. I still stand by that.

:laughing: Yeah, we are particularly good at baffling outsiders with the way we pronounce place names.
But you are completely off-base with your "redneck" comment: we don't have the climate for that. In London though, it's quite easy to become a greyneck.

Nice Lisnaholic :) I now work in wastewater management, including surface water like rainwater runoff and culverted rivers like you posted above. I would love a trip into some of London's bigger culverts, appropriately dressed and with a gas detector, of course!

Small world we live.. @tore so this would likely only be of interest to just yourself....

Our next home was a place called Pebbles in Bexhill on Sea. East Sussex. The Lane we lived on was unmade then and All 3 directions around our Property was higher than ours, no more than approx 1 metre ...enough we soon discovered to be living in a basin. Two Wells one in full use and one filled in...so pleased so have our own water source for the garden plants...like this garden was ever doing without water....
On side of a hill from the top of the back garden to a drop to the driveway of a guessimate of 3/4 metres..at least it flowed away from us. The Pebsham Farm next door was our only way to change the flow on that side. I dug out a trench within the farmland near to our border fence and created a small stream and the exit of the rainwater would flow within the farmland now instead of into our garden.....it created a waterfall just next to the Lane. I added rocks so made a feature there..then the rain water crossed the Lane and opposite was a natural pond, initially...before the woods that were there became 5 properties and a water course was constructed where the natural pond was. It was done and dusted before they built the 5 properties, all built on stilts because the area was classed as a flood plain.
They built a tarmac surface as part of the deal that the builder/owner of the land opposite our place made with the local Planning Department=Rother County Council.
Installed street lighting, upsetting the few local residence's and the wildlife went through a hell of a change. Badgers Sets were within that land and protected...not by what went on within this council though...fact.
We had at times rain still flowing off from our property via the driveway as although the side with the Farm had been a success the other two sides there was nothing more we could do about those. All the properties had Wells at one time but having filled them in over the years we got there water instead. When the Lane's surface was built they also lowered the base of our driveway, installed drainage pipes under it to take the waste rain water, allegedly,but within months though the under pipes were blocked so the flow just built up on the driveway until it flowed off onto the new road and then flowed down the new cul de sac causing a minor flood outside peoples front gardens...no big deal but they were suppose to put in some cattle grids where our driveway hit the tarmac Lane...eventually via the Council they actually created some low rocks lined in a row in the cul de sac close, so when the rain flowed from our driveway it hit a series of strategically placed rocks which slowed down the flow before hitting a drain...well almost hitting it as mostly it still went where it did before! Just looked on Google Earth and you can actually see the lines of rocks....also if you look at the 20mph sign across the Lane you can view some of the water course ....

Oh no, your house in a basin! That's rough. We see variations on that theme here too, although your situation sounds pretty bad.

The street our previous house was in was a slope because this is a hilly country. If you looked down the street, there was a dead end at the end of it and then straight into the front porch of a house that itself was at least a meter or two lower than street level. Of course, whenever there was significant rain, a small river would flow down the street, right into that house. Yay for them! They tried putting like a tarmac ledge there, but it couldn't really have helped that much.

We also have a lot of areas that get flooded now and then and will likely become more so in the future with climate change. The weirdest thing, to me, is that some of the houses built in these areas have basements. So every time there's the inkling of a flood, there's water coming into those basements, both surface water and sewage coming up the pipes as surface water gets into the sewer and steals away all the capacity.

In my opinion, the best thing is to do a better job at regulating this at the (local) government level, like prohibiting people to build in certain areas or in certain ways (like building a basement). Expertise or even just competence on surface water is really lacking, at least here and in many layers of society.

The two houses we've bought so far, I did think about this so both our houses have been raised / above street level and well above public sewage lines so that there's little risk of it ever backing up all the way to our basement. At least unless we jam up our private pipes with something (but as the mantra goes, toilets are only for pee, poo, TP and maybe puke if you're sick).

Just pleased to have left it behind. Go back to the late 1800's and the farm existed and not much else . Plenty of Wells everywhere must have made a difference to any heavy rain that felled. The property we loved for quite a while even with the water...never ever could see any risk of flooding though . When plans were flying about..the Pebsham Farm next door becoming industrial.
Around 1200 new properties to be built nearby..and all the roads and services that go with those kind of plans....we felt now is the time to move, so we did and been here in France now for over 6 years and now very settled...in the rural...

:wavey:When faced with any variation of the same language or a completely different language the words are going to be often baffling....easy to judge the way something is said and misinterpret what a person is saying.....the French understand only what you say with the correct accent and the correct masc or fem usage.just for starters...we all know a car is masc and housekeeping is fem...apron or overalls, obvious right.
...no idea about red necks, although as a kid I did get sun burnt a lot, being a freckle faced kid...this lot seem happy about it though...

https://i0.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.or...ality=90&ssl=1

The River Wandle ..link.. not too much to read just enough info and lots of photos..
https://www.londonslostrivers.com/river-wandle.html

The Thames...link with some facts....https://www.britannica.com/place/River-Thames

Lawrence, MA
Methuen, MA
Tempe, AZ
Chula Vista, CA
Sabre Springs, CA

i lived in Houston Texas my hole life so far..... the end

Born and raised in New York City and for most of my adult years lived on Roosevelt Island, smack-dab in the middle of the East River.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island

https://rihs.us/

^^ Dang, didn't know you were a New Yorker! Only been once but that city is so friggin cool, would love to go back. Not in the wintertime though. Went there in January and I swear I've never been so cold in my life.

I'm gonna ignore the real theme of this thread (history) and just go with the places I've lived.

My life path:

0-14 years - Novalja, Pag Island, Croatia
14-29 - Rijeka, Croatia
29-32 - Dubai, UAE
32-32 (10 months) - Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
32-33 (9 months) - Milano, Italy
33- present (5 years) - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

What was that like? I've often thought of running away there just to get a job at the Burj. (loved skyscrapers since I was a kid)

00-19 - Chicago subs
19-22 - Friedburg Germany (Army)
22-Present - Chicago subs

You know the song "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys? I am the exact opposite of that. I do not get around.

:laughing:

;)

^ :laughing: I don't get around much, either - not these days.

I love it here (although it's sometimes a hectic place to live), but you're spot-on about the cold winters! It's also very hot and humid in summer, and those extremes can be uncomfortable.

I'm extremely jealous that you lived in Milano! It's always been a dream of mine to go to Italy. My grandmother was from Trieste, and I've always wanted to travel there and seek out her birthplace. :)

That's an impressive list of places, addidasss! :clap:

That looks like a supercool, unusual place to live: in the absolute heart of the city, but with a touch of nature and, I imagine, zero traffic accidents. Nice.

That is pretty darn cool. I never knew such a place existed.

London, rivers and bridges:-
This is something I posted in a conversatioon with OH:-

^^^^^

That reminds me of Bruges (from what I saw in the movie)

If you love skyscrapers, it's mind-blowing. Certainly blew my tiny island village mind. First time I road through Sheikh Zayed Road I thought I dropped into the future. Plus Burj Khalifa and Dubai Mall and the fountains. Plus the desert, first time living outside of Europe, Muslim country, quite an experience. It's also very American in the sense that you need a car to get everywhere, it's full of fast food joints and obese people. High quality of life but very little culture. People go there to earn a lot of money and go back to where they came from. It's a transit place, and you can feel it, it doesn't have a real city vibe, nobody is "from there". No real soul. Gets a bit boring after a while. Plus all the limitations of living in a Muslim absolute monarchy/dictatorship.

Italy is amazing in general. Milano is probably one of the more boring cities architecturally but everywhere you are in Italy you are maximum 30 minutes away from an amazing small town. I think it's probably the most interesting country in the world (architecture, history, food, nature). The only minus is the people. :laughing: At least in my experience, with due exceptions of course.

I'm also lucky that Rijeka, Croatia (where I have an apartment) is 1h from Trieste and 2 hours from Venice...I visited both places many times. Croatians go to shop to Trieste, some even to buy groceries...it's a nice city. :)

Sound's like a week in Vegas! :beer:

Likely, except without gambling ;)

I have loved the places I lived in until changes took place that affected out lives in a negative way. We moved from South London to the peace of Bexhill On Sea, my late mate Rosi was nearby in Hastings so that was the main criteria for me...and the sea...love the sea as a swimmer. Then that became a rat race of a place for us so with my Husbands yearnings we moved abroad to France, not what I wanted but would never stop my man's dream...It turned out to be my dream place, eventually also.