Five at 88: The Seddons Farm Almanac
In the winter of 2022, I returned to the Lancashire housing estate where five children grew up in a dormer bungalow at 88 Watling Street. The following photographs and reflections emerged from this peculiar pilgrimage. This is a silent conversation between memory and concrete, between the child who left and the adult who returned.
The sky goes grey in stages. First the blue drains away, then the edges blur, then something happens to the light, something you can't quite name but recognise instantly. Memory works the same way. Half-listening to voices that may not be there. Half-remembering conversations that may never have happened. The brain is terribly polite about its fictions. I stand at the corner where straight lines meet. Concrete. Fencing. The careless mathematics of suburban planning. Something in me calculates distances automatically: six steps to the lamppost, twelve to the garden gate, forty years to this exact spot. This was never meant to happen. The return. The standing still. The fading concrete roof tiles. The way certain bricks hold light differently than others. Half-thinking about the impossible problem of time. Half-numb to the cold that works its way into my feet. Half focused on the precise angle of a drainpipe that shouldn't matter but suddenly does. Memory isn't the photographs we take. It's what leaks between them. I did really grow up here. Right here. These pathways contained us. Five children staggered like chess pieces in age. Parents who knew things we didn't. I catch myself inventing details, then stopping, then inventing them differently. Only half-hearing: the echo of a kitchen radio, a wooden spoon against a pan, someone calling names in sequence until they found the right one. The voices fade each time I try to hear them clearly. Like pressing too hard on a bruise, the sensation changes under attention. This was never meant to happen. The standing still. The coming back. The realisation that places aren't waiting for you, they're just continuing. Behind fences, gardens rearrange themselves according to the whims and choices of new inhabitants and the old ones who still remain. Windows watch without recognition. Concrete cracks in patterns that follow their own logic. Come back, I think. But I'm not sure who I'm speaking to. Half-remembering the feeling of belonging without having to try. Half-mourning something I can't properly name. Half-accepting that memory works exactly as it should, preserving not what was there, but what we needed to see.
FEBRUARY 2022 : There's something peculiarly English about a 1970s housing estate in the February light. The brick takes on that quality, not quite orange, not quite brown, that only appears in places where the rain has had decades to settle into the mortar. I found myself standing outside 88 Watling Street, camera hanging awkwardly from my neck, wondering if our dormer bungalow had always been this modest in its proportions.
Seddons Farm Estate, Bury. Lancashire's answer to suburban dreaming, built when everyone still believed in the promise of central heating and matching curtains. Our dormer bungalow sat there, still watching the street with its upstairs windows like half-open eyes. The place where five children grew up, each precisely two years apart in that careful family planning that defined a certain kind of 1970s optimism.
Five children in a dormer bungalow requires a certain choreography of space and time that now seems impossible. How did my dad and mum manage all of this.
I walked along what was once our street, camera clicking at ordinary things - drainpipes, window frames, footpaths, corners, a particular angle where sunlight hit a side wall. Not because these things were beautiful or significant, but because they were still there, still holding their shape after all this time.
The houses on Watling Street maintain a steady gaze, neither impressed nor troubled by my return. Did I expect them to recognise me? To offer some acknowledgment of the child who once knew every crack in the pavement, every shortcut between houses?
The five of us haven't walked these streets together for decades now. The absence of my parents hangs in the air, a question I cannot begin to ask. Yet in the unchanging geometry of an estate of brick and concrete, I found an unexpected consolation.
Some things remain while everything else changes. Even a 1970s housing estate has its own stubborn form of permanence.
They scatter like seeds from a dandelion clock. That's what happens to people from places like this. A slow, then sudden dispersal. Some following magnetic pulls of ambition or necessity, others carried by chance toward lives no one could have predicted. And some rooted deeper, becoming the keepers of an accidental museum, the ones who know which trees were planted when, which structures replaced others and which memories dissolved into the soil. Do they see apparitions on these streets? Ghostly formations of children walking in height order, the physics of genetics and time made visible. The strange thing about memory is its lack of reciprocity. I remember certain faces with absolute clarity. But do these faces, wherever they exist now, remember mine? Do I occupy any space in their minds, or have I been gently erased, a background figure in someone else's narrative? I wonder about those who stayed. The older ones must be gone now, but perhaps their descendants remained, inheriting the bricks and the obligation to remember. Do they still tell stories that include nameless others, or have we been edited out? I imagine them sometimes, the ones who never left, watching strangers like me return with cameras and careful expressions. Do they recognise the choreography of nostalgia? The way we stand too long at certain corners, peer too intently at ordinary houses? Perhaps they've developed a taxonomy of returners - the curious, the wounded, the triumphant and the lost. What peculiar creatures we are, carrying these universes inside us. In mine, certain people remain thirteen forever, their laughs in frequencies I could identify blindfolded. In theirs, if they think of me at all, I'm probably just one who passed through, neither remarkable nor forgettable. Sometimes I think we return not to remember but to be remembered, to press ourselves against the solid evidence that we once existed here. See this path? My feet wore its pattern. See that wall? My hands learned its texture. I wonder if others come back too. If we pass each other, separated by weeks or days, each believing we're the only ones making this odd pilgrimage. Perhaps these streets keep a silent tally of returning children, some as regular as clockwork, others appearing after decades, all searching for something we can't name. This is what I want to know most of all: in the grand ledger of remembering and forgetting, which column am I in for the people who shared this pocket of time and space with me? Am I a footnote, a chapter heading, or merely a shape that seems vaguely familiar? Do they ever stand at certain corners and think of someone whose name they can almost, but not quite, recall? Perhaps that's why we document these returns. Not to remember, but to insist: I was here. We were here. Though the names fade, something of us remains.
