Crowle Street Kids:
East Hull Childhoods of the 1960s

ed. Ray Robinson and Steve Rudd

ISBN 978 1 872438 59 7  253 x 154mm Forthcoming, illus., pbk., abt. £14.95

The Sixties is an often quoted, often referred-to period.  Sociologists have been pondering its impact for years.  Supposedly, the Swinging Sixties blew away the fusty Fifties and ushered in a new era of prosperity and freedom for all.  But Carnaby Street is a long way from Hedon Road.  What was the 1960s really like in the working class North of England?  Did the Cuban missile crisis, the space race, the Kennedy assassinations and the Vietnam War have much resonance for those people living in the pattern of Victorian streets which lay behind a busy arterial road feeding the docks of Britain ’s third port?

Originally an online collection of memories of those who attended Crowle Street School, East Hull, in the period from roughly the end of the Second World War until its demolition by Hull City Council in the 1970s, this archive grew to include photographs and other memories of the immediate area, its characters, its social fabric, its industries, its celebrations and its tragedies.
 

This in itself would be a valuable archive, because despite our presumed familiarity with the 1960s, it is in many ways a vanished era.  Its clothes, cars, entertainments and habits recede into the distance and begin to look like anthropology.  What makes these recollections especially valuable is that they are the first-hand reminiscences of people who were children in that area at the time.  These authentic voices, echoing down the intervening 40 to 50 years, recall what it was like to gather wood for bonfire night, to shop in local corner shops, to buy hot cakes from the baker’s van, to play marbles, skipping, hopscotch and many other innocent games in playgrounds with wickets or goalposts whitewashed on to the rough brick walls, long demolished now.

The whole area of Crowle Street and its surrounding complex of terraces, closes and alleys was levelled in the 1970s, victim to the City Council’s massive “slum clearance” initiatives.  These days every trace – even of the elegant school building itself – has been erased by the mighty hand of “progress” (whatever that means). 

Only the memories remain, not only of Crowle Street but other areas of Hull - the Hessle Road comes to mind - and right across the North of England where similar destruction occurred.  The resonance of these distant voices calling to us from vanished communities will appeal to the general reader as well social historians across England.

The old saw about, “If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there”, needs to be reconsidered:  Crowle Street Kids records the experiences of those who really were there, with a freshness and vivacity which will transport you too back to those grimy terraced streets.   Was it “progress”?  You decide.

Now read about Steve Rudd's other books:

Arran Diaries

Here Endeth the Epilogue

Loitering With Tin Tent

Purr-a-Medics

The Domesday Hedge and other poems

Twenty-Three Poems
 

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