Middle Street Terraces

I made a mistake yesterday by describing the terraced houses I blipped as if they were typical of this type of housing. In fact, those ones are terribly posh, with walled front gardens and three storeys, built in a road where other houses were being built at the time (1800s) for Stroud's emerging middle class.

These houses, in Middle Street, are in the Conservation area, or "Old Stroud" which cannot be altered greatly without permissions. That in itself is still a bit posh. The shops used to be located up here, above the area by the former Co-op building, rather than down in the present day High Street. If you view this in Large, you'll see a red thing that is in fact a Brooke Bond tea sign in one of the transoms. It might have been a grocer's shop once.

The dormer windows are not typical of terraced housing, but the opening-straight-onto-the -street is. Some houses might have tiny front 'areas', from which possibly the iron railings were removed during WWII to be used as munitions (they never were: what happened to all that iron?). Stroud doesn't have many 'back to backs' but in other towns they were common: a terraced house with a small back yard, adjoined by another back yard and house. The families lived literally 'back to back'. My sister had one of those houses in Deepdale, Preston, in the north of England, but the row behind had been removed at some point, leaving a bit more street for the kids to play out in. The cobblestones there were in danger of being removed, as they weren't popular with car owners.

There aren't any cobbles here, but car ownership is high, as you can see. In the far left you can just make out a red brick 'house' next to the cream building. This is in fact flats/apartments, and the upstairs one was my first solo dwelling in Stroud. I lived there from 1994 to 1996, when it began to feel too small. The flats ( and houses, which you can't see) in this development are called Sutton Gardens, because there was formerly a (gardening) nursery called Sutton's on this site. There was another Sutton's site close to where we live near now. This was replaced by an estate of Housing Association properties, called Nursery Close, in the early noughties.

I enjoyed getting back to my art appreciation (1600-1900) course today, and also walking along the canal back from Stroud to Waitrose. The pedestrian has to alight from the towpath and walk along main roads from there onwards, as the earth moving process is still in progress, with heavy machinery from Griffith's of Abergavenny on site. No way will the towpath be open again by the end of February, as originally hoped. Considering the team are diverting the course of the canal around a local beauty spot, and building an accessible-to-all path by a former rubbish tip, as well as having worked through an exceedingly wet winter, they are doing ok. I do cherish the hope of cycling to work along the towpath one day.